Zinio

My neighbor showed me Zinio on his iPad last night, saying he loves it for getting digital copies of his magazines on there. I grabbed it and took a few minutes to check it out today.

It’s a fairly full featured selection of magazines that you can grab, and there are Mac/PC apps as well as iPhone apps that you can use to sync up your whole magazine collection.

However when I looked at what it costs for Popular Science. A single issue is $4.99 and a 12 issue subscription is $19.99. If I get the print magazine, I get it for $12. Granted the digital copy has video in it, but I can mostly get those videos on the web. I guess you are paying for convenience, but that doesn’t seem to make sense.

I checked Road and Track as well and while the print is $12, the Zinio price is $8, which seems to make more sense to me. Consumer Reports is the same price from Zinio or for print.

It’s a bit of a strange pricing model, and consumer beware. However the images are stunning, and I might need to try a subscription of something to see what I think.