As I slowly recover from an action packed weekend (a wedding rehearsal, wedding and a DockDogs event… didn’t see that third one coming, did you?), I wanted to circle back on a topic related to my web-only challenge. When I first began my self-inflicted experiment to boycott client applications twelve days ago, I mentioned a few exceptions due to work. I also tucked in one more potential exception because I love to read digital content in the form of eBooks and digital magazines. I’m still out of luck for my eReader library, but it’s worth noting that my digital magazine subsriptions are in play with my web-only experiment!
Most of my magazine subscriptions are through Zinio, the online site that offers digital periodicals that we’ve mentioned a number of times before. Their Zinio Reader software is among the first applications I load up on any PC or Mac I buy, so I figured that not only would I be losing my eReader content during this challenge, but I’d be missing my digital magazines as well. I found out this past weekend that Zinio offers a web-based reader for any magazine content you subscribe to and the experience is nearly the equivilent of using their software.
There’s nothing to download: no Firefox extension or plug-in needed, although it appears that the reader is Flash based. If there is a plug-in, I must have already had it, because I was able to navigate in Firefox through my digital library of periodicals and read, read, read. The online reader offers around 10 keyboard shortcuts to help with navigation and of course, I’m able to easy move around using the touchscreen on my UMPC as well.
Clearly, the biggest downside here is that if you lose connectivity, you’re not able to read your content. Yup, there’s no offline feature yet using something like Google Gears or some other mechanism. If there’s one bit of feedback I could provide to the Zinio folks it would be to develop some way to temporarily download the magazine content and allow for offline use. Having said that however, it’s nice to know that I can still access the subscriptions I’ve paid for right through my web client without a bulky client application.
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