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Do any of you get National Geographic via the Zinio app? Up til now, it was "enhanced" to the point of being almost too annoying to read. Every article had the first paragraph, then you tapped a link to open a popup in order to read the rest of the article. Slideshows or videos (or both) embedded in each article. Lots of interactive features. It was beautiful to look at, but sucked to try to just read the magazine. I feel certain that all of those extras costed Nat Geo a fortune to include in a digital edition that sells for half of the printed subscription price.
About a month ago, they sent out a very long survey about the interactiveness.
This month's issue was delayed by half a month. When it finally came a couple of days ago, it is completely different. No more popups just to read the articles, because now it has a scroll feature. Fewer videos and things.
Previously, it took anywhere from 1 to 3 hours to download. This most recent issue took about 5 minutes.
SO I SEE THIS DE-EVOLUTION to be the fate of any app book. Buyers will either choose to go for a book loaded with all sort of fancy tricks, or else the cost of making the extras will limit it to something like maybe video covers or whatever.
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