{"id":261486,"date":"2008-04-14T20:07:04","date_gmt":"2008-04-14T20:07:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2008\/04\/14\/zinio-oh-zinio\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T17:32:17","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T17:32:17","slug":"zinio-oh-zinio","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2008\/04\/14\/zinio-oh-zinio\/","title":{"rendered":"Zinio, oh Zinio"},"content":{"rendered":"

PW Daily today pointed us to Zinio<\/a>, 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.” <\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Not to mention the fact that every one of these books (I assume) is available on Project Gutenberg<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n

When you’re making Amazon look like forward-thinking folks with their Kindle, you know you need to go back to the drawing board.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":46,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67486],"tags":[5846,2136,11436],"class_list":["post-261486","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-e-books","tag-ejvl","tag-zinio"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/261486","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/46"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=261486"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/261486\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":358606,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/261486\/revisions\/358606"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=261486"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=261486"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=261486"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}