22 December 2011 | First World Dilemma: Zinio vs. Amazon Kindle App

With the war in Iraq at an end and Afghanistan all but forgotten, can we now focus on some more pressing issues here?

No, I an not talking about who is the GOP presidential candidate favorite this week, but an update to Amazon's Kindle app on the iPad, now offering the company's own newsstand support for magazine and newspapers. 

I told you, this is very important stuff. 

I've been using the Zinio app since the iPad was originally released to get my hand on magazines for reading. The initial products weren't that good but very serviceable: what you're dealing with here are scanned images of the print version. This is not a long-term solution because this approach shows that publishers are still trapped in thinking that explains the slow, tortured death of print news and magazines. PDFs are not going to cut it either because reading a magazine or newspaper on a tablet (oh come on, we really mean **iPad**) in that format is not a solution at all. In fact, that helps explain why publishers felt disappointed when the original iPad did not suddenly transform the news industry like it had been hyped: publishers actually had to do the work to embrace the new format and its possibilities rather than seriously thinking scanned images of their printed magazines would be an acceptable thing for consumers. (Not to mention paying the same price or higher, but that's another story).

So unless a publisher made a specific app, Zinio was the place to go. And since 2010, it's been the little app that could: many magazines have offered text views of articles, zooms result in clear type, rather than fuzzy close ups. In lieu of a different solution, Zinio has been working very well. 

But now Amazon has stepped into the fray, at least in terms of its iPad app. Now that magazines and newspapers can be viewed within the app, I figured comparing a Zinio version of Men's Journal with the Amazon one would be apropos. Both offer the ability to read the (still scanned) magazine in its printed form, and both offer a text only view. And this is where they differ. 

While Zinio has gotten better at letting a reader pinch and zoom text that will remain clear and clean, the Amazon version of Men's Journal suffers from fuzzy text. This is perplexing because when viewed full page in either landscape or portrait mode, pictures and text look the same. You would believe that you're dealing with the same scanned file. Additionally, Zinio often links article in the table of contents directly to their pages; Kindle doesn't. To get to an article on page 35, you need to tap the screen to bring up page thumbnails across the bottom of the screen and scroll your way to the article in question. A minor thing, really, but Zinio's implementation is easier to use.

As mentioned, the Kindle app has a text only view that actually is a bit more attractive, although it's hard to quantify this. Unlike Zinio, in text only view, pictures still appear, although sized down but certainly not to some ugly thumbnail. The text itself can be arranged in single to triple columns, swiping right to advance. With Zinio, you merely swipe down. And down. And down. Hardly the stuff that nightmares are made of, but there was such an appreciable difference between the two that I lost sleep at night: whose ecosystem to support?

Amazon's Kindle app is starting to resemble more of kiosk now that you can view magazines and newspapers. And there is definitely an upside to storing all the Amazon-purchased material in one spot, although you do need to utilize the browser for such. (Zinio does have in-app purchases.) And therein is the quandry: with such minor differences (how many times do you ponder what text view makes or breaks a decision? Surely a sign of the times) does it really matter? In a way, yes because these choices seem less like consumer freedom and more like commitments. Maybe that's just geek mentality, but it's real enough to spend seven hundred words wondering which company will get my dollars.

Maybe there *is* a point to this after all.