Today I got an email notification of the release of a Zinio application for the iPhone.  For those of you that haven’t run across Zinio, it is a visually oriented digital reader software.  It was primarily focused on magazines but has been diversifying into books and textbooks.


Zinio offers a very compelling reading experience with full colored digital magazines that look pretty much the same as they do on paper, including some nice age turning visual effects. While they do seem to offer more than one viewing mode, with a text only mode which seems designed to make it easy to read on a small screen, the whole thing begs for a larger screen.


With the release of this application coming just one week before Apple’s media event it might just be that this application is an early release for the iPhone of an application that was already developed for Apple’s supposed new Tablet like device.  It would make sense for Apple to seek out a content provider such as Zinio which can bring into the iPhone/iPod platform hundreds of highly regarded titles such as BusinessWeek, Newsweek, Popular Science, MacWorld, PCWorld, PC Magazine, etc.


A quick look at Zinio’s website will get you a view of the new Zinio Library software which looks very much like iTunes, though it is probably just a convenient way of having millions of iPhone users familiar with how your software works. 


What do you think?

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Amazon took the Kindle to the world, with international shipping.  Sony introduced new models of its Sony Reader with more size, feature and pricing options. The new Pocket and Touch editions are speacially interesting as they add both a lower price and touch-enabled options.

This year should be much, much better.  With a wider range of readers and hopefully a wider range of prices from which to choose from, we should see a lot more people starting to get their toes wet with eBooks.

While I don’t use a dedicated reader, but my iPod, I find that a lot of people reject this idea out hand because of the size of the screen.  Just recently as I started to explain to a friend that just because the screen was small it didn’t mean the type had to be small, he cut me off dismissively as if to say “Hey, you are a fanatic, its obvious that the text is too small, so stop bothering me with it”.    I never cease to amaze my self how people manage to delude themselves that whatever they haven’t tried or don’t feel like experimenting must be bad, regardless of what they hear. For some of these people, even a 15 inch screen will still not be good enough because they will tell you that it doesn’t feel like a book.

The Net is simply buzzing with the rumors that Apple will introduce a new device this month which might have the reading of electronic publications as one of its features.  To tell the truth, while I think that Apple might just  want to add this business to their iTunes offerings, they don’t even have to do that in order to shake the eBook world.  If the rumored Apple Tablet device is capable of running iPhoneOS applications or if it is a simple process to update the iPhone applications to run on it, the applications for eBook reading on iPhone will be more than enough to make this device almost irresistible to eBook lovers.

Imagine a reader with a full color screen capable of displaying anything you’ve purchased over the past years plus full color PDF documents.  Just that is more than enough to make most users of ebook readers salivate. If you add in the ability to listen to audiobooks, browse the Web, do email, use Twitter, access Facebook, LinkedIn, listen to your music and watch movies…  Depending on how much such a device costs, things could get ugly for reader manufacturers.

While all this is still speculation, it seems pretty clear to me that interest in ebooks will continue to grow.  If we will see a regular organic growth pattern or an explosive one is still to be seen.  If Apple joins the game, I’ll put my money on explosive.  What do you think?

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