Zinio Puts 100+ Classics Online as E-Books
By Lynn Andriani -- Publishers Weekly, 4/11/2008 9:56:00 AM
Zinio wants publishers to know it is open for business—e-book business, that is. The online publishing, distribution and retail-services company has launched a series of classics in e-book format at www.zinio.com/classics. There are more than 100 books available and they are free for anyone to read.
Of course, copies of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and The Three Musketeers have been available free on the Internet for years; so why is Zinio touting its new line? The company “wanted to showcase the most impressive on-screen reading experience while maintaining the integrity and feel of the old classics,” said CEO Rich Maggiotto. Zinio currently partners with Hearst, IDG, Hachette Filipacchi, McGraw-Hill, Primedia, Ziff Davis and other media companies, and is seeking to expand its partnerships to more book publishers.
To that end, it built a site where visitors can read books in a high-fidelity format. They can view the titles on a scrollable bookshelf and click on the spine of a book to open it in their browser. Readers can search for content within the books, share titles with friends or save books to read offline later.
Zinio powers BN.com’s Look Inside the Book feature, which has been very successful. “We started realizing we had a potential market ripe for the technology Zinio has,” said Maggiotto. Maggiotto sees the Zinio classics line as a way for the company to enter the e-books market.
