Zinio's multiplatform digital magazine reader makes its iPad debut with a free app loaded with a few full issues (including Car and Driver and SPIN), plus access to a store where you can purchase thousands of other popular magazine issues. Not only is Zinio a very functional, one-stop digital newsstand, but it also offers convenient, reasonably priced subscriptions. Most of Zinio's magazines closely resemble their print counterparts, but while the full-screen images look great, zooming in can reveal fuzzy text, and it takes a couple seconds to properly load each page. And frankly, the included, video-heavy VIVmag doesn't really resemble what was shown in the impressive preview trailers.
Zinio lets you load up on many popular print favorites, like Esquire.
Zinio Magazine Newsstand & Reader for iPad
COMPANY: Zinio
CONTACT: www.zinio.com
PRICE: Free
IDW's comic reader isn't quite as visually polished as Marvel's app, but it's the place to be for licensed books like Star Trek, Transformers, CSI, or one of dozens of other series. As in Marvel's app, the high-resolution page scans look great on the iPad display, but IDW's reader sadly doesn't let you pop between single panels (though it does have a nice two-page landscape view). We also encountered a couple bugs that forced us to restart the app to keep reading, but we'd expect those to be ironed out via updates. Still, with 400+ comics available at launch, there's plenty for comic fans to choose from here.
Action scenes pop off the iPad screen with high-resolution pages.
IDW Comics 1.5
COMPANY: Idea and Design Works, LLC
CONTACT: www.idwpublishing.com
PRICE: Free
Lewis Carroll's 1865 children's fantasy novel, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, comes to the iPad in an imaginatively designed app that pairs the original text with striking page layouts and interactive elements that correspond with movements of the iPad. Granted, the actual text of the novel is public domain now--you can download it for free in both iBooks and Kindle -- but Alice for the iPad is meant to be more of an interactive storybook for younger readers. And though the $9 price point may be a bit hard to swallow for some, it's a sharp example of how to enhance children's literature on the device.
Alice for the iPad updates Carroll's original drawings and adds interactive elements.
Alice for the iPad 1.0
COMPANY: Atomic Antelope
CONTACT: www.atomicantelope.com
PRICE: $8.99
The Wall Street Journal. is the largest of the top digital newspapers on iPad to date, offering free access to an edition that updates with new stories throughout the day. Each screen is loaded with information, for better (the story listing sidebar) and for worse (navigation can be confusing), though by and large, the Wall Street Journal. is a very readable and worthwhile package. However, a fair chunk of the content is held behind pay walls, and the current pricing model ($17.29/month) has triggered some backlash, as a print/web subscription ($140/year) is much cheaper. Until that's addressed, we're likely to favor other newspapers for the time being.
The Wall Street Journal resembles a print paper, but with digital tweaks.
The Wall Street Journal 1.0.1
COMPANY: Wall Street Journal
CONTACT: www.wsj.com
PRICE: Free
Men's monthly GQ Magazine first appeared on the iPhone in December, and this universal version takes advantage of the iPad's large display to depict higher resolution images and page scans. GQ offers two distinct ways to read the latest issue, but we recommend sticking to the print scans in landscape orientation -- the portrait perspective used here isn't as striking or intuitive as TIME's, making you enter and exit sub-pages to read the stories, with the same handful of full-screen ads shown numerous times. GQ does top TIME in one regard, though: it's a single app with the latest issue included, and back issues are $1.99 each.
In portrait view, GQ's stories place the text on the bottom with media up top.
GQ Magazine 3.0
COMPANY: CondeNet
CONTACT: www.gq.com
PRICE: $2.99
ilikeimac
April 08, 2010 at 12:01am
I've heard a few different people express concerns about the apps for reading popular news publications. Besides getting a richer experience than available on the web (which is seldom the case), what's in it for readers? The concern is that these publications want to pull readers into a controlled environment without a bookmark menu or Google search prompt to lure them elsewhere. The lack of article comments (in all the ones I've looked at so far) and the ability to link to an article your reading are also drawbacks, only I'm not sure if the publishers see those as desirable or not.
