Organizing magazines

[slayda]

Are magazines also in epub DRMed format?

[boswd]

I think they are in PDF format if I'm not mistaken.

[slayda]

Some of you who have rooted your NCs might be interested in an email correspondence I recently had with Zinio (a digital magazine 'producer'). It works on PC, not sure about Mac but their versions are cheaper than B&N's. See emails below;

----------------mine-------------------------------------------
I'm looking very closely at Android tablets . I highly recommend them as future platforms for the Zinios magazine app.

--------------their answer-------------------------------------
Currently, the Android app is available exclusively for the Samsung Galaxy Tab. We are working on an expansion plan. If you’d like to recommend a specific device, please let us know by sending an email to support@zinio.com. Be sure to include “Zinio for Android” in the subject line.

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Their Android app looks like a good future app for the rooted NC.

[Bookworm_Girl]

I have the zinio iPhone app. I am surprised that they don't already have an Android version. The iPhone app is sort of similar to the NC magazine reader. It shows you a graphic image of the page on which you can zoom / pan and there is a button to display article text only.

[slayda]

Originally Posted by Bookworm_Girl

I have the zinio iPhone app. I am surprised that they don't already have an Android version. The iPhone app is sort of similar to the NC magazine reader. It shows you a graphic image of the page on which you can zoom / pan and there is a button to display article text only.

The PC app only allows zoom & pan but no text only. I guess they figure that with a PC screen you don't need it.

It was the iPhone, iPod, iPad apps that I saw in a magazine that prompted me to ask about an Android app. I checked the National Geographic price for a one year subscription - $10. On the NC at B&N it's $1.99/month (or $23.88/year - over twice the cost).

Do you know if the iPhone Zinio subscription is the same as the PC one?

BTW Zinio's limited ebook selection is high priced on the one book I checked - $8.99 for Zinio, $7.19 for B&N, $4.79 for Amazon, & $4.48 for BonB (the book was Who Goes There by John W Campbell).

[Bookworm_Girl]

Originally Posted by slayda

It was the iPhone, iPod, iPad apps that I saw in a magazine that prompted me to ask about an Android app. I checked the National Geographic price for a one year subscription - $10. On the NC at B&N it's $1.99/month (or $23.88/year - over twice the cost).

Do you know if the iPhone Zinio subscription is the same as the PC one?

Interestingly there is no National Geographic offered in the iPhone app! It jumps from Muscle Mustangs & Fast Fords to Natural Health... I did a google search. Apparently there is a stand-alone National Geographic Magazine app for the iPad (it's interactive including video and powered by Zinio). I checked the iTunes app store, and there is no iPhone equivalent. Let me know if there is another magazine you want me to check because they have just about every other title you could imagine. There are roughly 350+ magazines to choose from! That would be awesome for a rooted NC!!!

I did not know that Zinio sells ebooks. The iPhone app only has magazines.

[slayda]

Bookworm_Girl, have you tried looking at the Internet Zinio site. I haven't looked very closely to see if the magazines there can be bought for the iPhone or not. I just assumed all of them would be applicable.

I started with Zinio several years ago but let it drop & just recently started back with them.

Edit: I see now on their site that each magazine is marked whether you want PC, Mac, IiPhone or iPad & some don't have iPhone available. All that I checked have the other three though.

Second edit: The books seem to be only for PC & Mac. I hope they will all (magazines & books) open up soon for Android tablets too because I'll either have a Notion Ink Adam (10" Android tablet) for Christmas or a NookColor which will soon be rooted.

[Bookworm_Girl]

slayda, what an excellent idea! I have never visited the zinio website. Don't know why - just never thought of it! I have always just used my iPhone app. I see now that I can log-in on my computer and read my magazines on a big screen. The internet viewer also has pan/zoom but no text viewer. The iPhone is too small to read magazines for very long without getting frustrated. Magazines is one of the main reasons why I bought my NC. It works quite well. Not as great as an iPad screen would but well enough to make me happy.

I tried the zinio website in the NC browser to see if I could access my library that way. However, it needs Adobe Flash so it's not viewable at the present time. Maybe with the Android 2.2 update next year it will work.

Thanks again for teaching me new things about zinio!

[Bookworm_Girl]

Originally Posted by Steven Lyle Jordan

I'm considering the NC for future (and possibly past) magazine reading.

I'd like to be able to organize B&N-bought magazines and sideloaded magazines according to title and date (possibly by year as well). Will the shelf system allow me to do that?

Steven, back to your question from our side discussion about zinio... I had some time today to make a screenshot of how the magazines are organized.

The NC Library has a shelf called "magazines". On this shelf you can mix your BN purchases and sideloaded content. I attached a screenshot of my magazine shelf. The Smithsonian and Wired Magazines are my sideloaded content. I created them using calbre's Fetch News. The US Weekly is my guilty indulgence purchase from the BN store. I have sorted the magazines by Title. It uses the metadata for Publisher for the Title sort (not the magazine title). It groups like magazines sideways on the shelf from newest to oldest (left to right) as you can see for the US Weekly magazine in my screenshot which has 3 issues. Note: If you have different magazine titles by the same publisher, then it will group them on a single shelf unless you edit the metadata to change the publisher name to the magazine title.

Another observation is that when I do a "Most Recent" sort, it groups the BN content first and then it groups the side-loaded content after the BN content. Thus on a Most Recent sort, your BN and side-loaded content are not mixed up like they are on the shelf title view.

You can also create custom-named shelves where you have more flexibility to group by years, magazine title, subject or whatever else you desire. On the custom-named shelves, all of your types of data like books, magazines, periodicals can also be mixed up and sorted together in any way you like. See the icons across the top of the image in my screenshot. You can group data by type of content (e.g. books, magazines, newspapers). Or, you can group data all mixed up to your customization in "my shelves".

Hope that helps! The NC really displays magazines beautifully with the color images compared to my e-ink ereaders. And, I really like the cover flow views.

EDIT: FYI - The "my files" category is where you could view your nested folders because it shows you the file structure.

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

Yeah, that looks like just what I'm looking for!

Now, if only I could get PDFs of my old magazines from decades back...