If you really want to go Green use Zinio for your magazines
By Susan Wilson
What is environmentally better than buying a book or magazine? Buying it online to either read on the Internet or download to read on your computer. No muss, no fuss, no scattered magazines lying around taking up space, no magazines to throw in a landfill.
Zinio allows you to subscribe to your favorite magazines like Elle, US News and World Report, or PC World electronically. You still get the same magazine online that you would buy at a news stand. All of the visual elements are the same, including the ads, so you don’t have to worry about missing anything by getting the magazine electronically.
Several advantages to electronic magazines, is that you can change the size of the type so that you can read it better. You can zoom in or out on a page and you even have the option of highlighting or annotating the magazine as you go. You can even read your magazines on your iPhone.
Zinio provides you with its own reader for downloading and reading your magazines. This is not a service that allows you to use a reader you already have. For instance, you can subscribe to newspapers and magazines via MobiPocket but you don’t get the same presentation that you get with Zinio.
The magazine choice is extensive, multilingual and worldwide. You will find magazines from the Czech Republic, China, Venezuela, Canada, Denmark, France and Italy, just to name a few, written in their native language. Zinio does not offer translated versions of any of its magazines but you can find magazines like ELLE that publish magazines for different countries such as ELLE Czech and ELLE Sweden.
Some of the subscriptions have special features that are only found in the electronic versions like videos and photo outtakes that you won’t get in the printed version of the publications.
Zinio offers a variety of “Specials” including some free samples of books and magazines, as well as, magazines that are specially priced just for Zinio. You can search for magazines by price, interest, language, or country.
You can also buy single issues of magazines or books that are published by one of the magazines like The Computer Active Ultimate Guide to Home Networking, and Super Cars by Road & Track. The site also carries other books and even textbooks.
If you want to read (or are required to read) a classic like Beowolf or Emma you can also find them here. Since the reading program allows for highlighting and annotations, you can read the book for free while highlighting or note taking for class.
The prices for the magazines run from less than $5 for such Magazines like Motor Trend, Sail, and Kitchens and Baths to over $600 for Jane’s Defense Weekly. Not all of the prices at Zinio are cheaper than the news stand version.
Granted you can’t use old copies for children’s school projects or making collages from the pictures but you also don’t have to deal with the rapidly expanding stack of old issues either.
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