Sunday, January 22, 2012

Zinio: the easiest way to read a digital magazine


A screencast about a digital magazine reader? How po-mo of me.

As our first-year students embark on a tradition dating back to before even I was a student - "the magazine project" - I hope that they take heart at knowing that this might be one of the last years we care about whether they print it or even call it a "magazine" (I hope - I'm starting to feel like I'm trying to sell Gutenberg a stone tablet).

As the magazine stand at 7-Eleven continues to shrink and print pubs continue to fold, I thank Zinio for keeping the magazine-reading experience alive and well on my laptop, iPad, and iPhone.

Zinio bills itself as "the world's largest newsstand and bookstore," allowing you to subscribe, search, read, share, save, and sync magazine content. 

You can buy the Zinio app for iPhone and iPad in the App Store, or download the Zinio Reader for your laptop.

Screencasting for dummies (like me)

By the way, the embedded video above is my very first screencast, as you can tell by my "ummms" and "tsks."

I made it using the trial version of the Snapz Pro X software, which is pretty cool if you can get past having to wear the nerdy microphone headgear ("roger, roger!"). To post it here, I simply recorded it on my laptop using the software, uploaded it to Vimeo (YouTube works too, but I hate it), and used the embed code to show it on my blog.

1 comment:

  1. I finally checked out this App and Zinio has 80% of the print I subscribe to... at a fraction of the cost!

    How do I NOT make the switch?!

    Hopefully disposable eyeballs will be invented before mine burn up from excessive screen usage.

    ReplyDelete

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