Zinio, oh Zinio

PW Daily today pointed us to Zinio, who are giving away more than 100 classics on their site and who “wanted to showcase the most impressive on-screen reading experience while maintaining the integrity and feel of the old classics.”

What this means: You can go to their site, and browse their “virtual library,” which is set up to look like a row of leather bound books on your shelf. When you click on one of the books, it opens the Zinio reader, which provides the aforementioned “most impressive on-screen reading experience,” in your browser. The reader is set up to look like a book. You can even “turn the pages” by dragging a corner of a page on to the other page.

Dear Zinio, this embarrasses both of us. First, you’re assuming that I’ll like your service because it reproduces an experience I’m familiar with, which suggests that you think I’m a dummy who is afraid of the internet. Second, this reader is about the furthest thing away from the book reading experience I can imagine; and that the Zinio people think providing a thrice-removed, hollowed-out shell of a familiar experience will drive people to start using their service gives you some idea of how far the Zinio people are from understanding the future of e-books.

Not to mention the fact that every one of these books (I assume) is available on Project Gutenberg, who have the common decency to provide public domain books in an open format, while Zinio’s ‘innovation’ locks you into an, at best, awkward, and horribly slow, in-browser reader or an equally awful desktop client.

When you’re making Amazon look like forward-thinking folks with their Kindle, you know you need to go back to the drawing board.