Nontrivial Exercises

My Quest for Electronic Magazine Reading - Part 1

One very natural use of tablet PC’s is the way you can read traditionally paper media in a comfortable format of a slate tablet, or a convertible in slate mode. eBooks are growing in popularity, with several selections on Amazon available for download in electronic format. There are still not enough books in ebook format for me, though, as I did a quick search through my Amazon wish list and found only a couple of the titles available electronically.

Magazines are also exploring electronic delivery, though in various formats. Reading magazines electronically is much more productive for me, as it allows me to more quickly get to where I want to go, and to capture any articles or sections that I want to keep – either via printing to a PDF or capturing to OneNote.

What appears to me to be the de facto and near-ubiquitous standard application for reading magazines in electronic format is Zinio Reader. The application is free, available for Windows and OSX, and the latest version has some added interface elements tailored for the tablet pc. You download the reader and then create an account that you can then link to electronic subscriptions to several top publications. [Note: Zinio offers some titles that are not exactly family friendly, and the Zinio home page displays the covers of these, though they don’t appear to be as explicit as they could be, just suggestive.]

I’ve decided to make an active effort to secure all the publications to which I subscribe in an electronic delivery format. Here are the results so far based on what the publishers offer:

• Network World – YES, delivered in Zinio
• eWeek – YES, delivered in Zinio
• Wireless Week – YES, delivered via an email notification, with a link that shows the magazine in a browser plug-in application that simulates a real magazine page experience. After the magazine comes up in the browser application, you have the option of downloading the entire magazine in PDF format, which I usually do.
• Information Week – APPARENTLY – I had to call customer service to ask if they offered electronic delivery. The customer service rep said they did, she took my info and told me I was now signed up. That was earlier this week so I’ll see if this really works next week.
• VarBusiness – NO – I again called customer service, since there is nothing on their web page about electronic delivery. When I posed the question about electronic delivery, the rep had to ask her supervisor. A moment later she told me that her supervisor said they do offer electronic delivery but that I had to sign up on the web site. I asked her where on the web site I could do this, she looked with me still on the phone, and said she couldn’t find anywhere. She then gave me the phone number of the web site support team. When I called this number, it eventually went so someone’s voice mail that ended in a fast busy signal, so I couldn’t even leave a message. I finally sent in a customer service request (which I could actually do from their web site) asking for clarification. I received a reply later in the day that in fact, VarBusiness is not available for electronic delivery. What a shame.
• Fast Company – NO – This has become one of my favorite monthly reading activities, as it stimulates my thoughts on leadership, productivity and business trends. Unfortunately, though, they don’t offer electronic delivery, at least through Zinio. I contacted Zinio and they told me they don’t have plans to offer FastCompany at present. I have also submitted a request to FastCompany, but have not heard back from them yet.

This is my quest for completely electronic magazine reading so far. I will explore other titles and report on how this is working in the weeks ahead. Meanwhile, I welcome input on whether you read magazines in electronic format, and whether I’m missing something in my quest thus far.