I was lucky enough to get in on a free 1 year subscription to PC Magazine a couple months ago. I stopped buying it years ago because it was becoming so Internet-centric and home-user oriented that it lost the power-user edge it had when PCs weren’t as popular in the pre-$20-ISP age. I still read it now and then, and the columns from Bill Machrone and especially John C. Dvorak still are almost worth the cover price alone. Sadly, when I got to the free subscription offer, all the print-edition giveaways were gone, so I had to accept the subscription in digital format only. I figured, “well, it’s still PCMag, and still free, so why not.” I already have a print edition subscription to eWeek, and grab the PDF versions when I need an article and I’ve already tossed the aging paper version. I was not-too-pleasantly surprised to see PC Magazine’s digital edition isn’t in PDF, but in a format from a company called Zinio for their proprietary Zinio Reader. Frankly, Adobe’s PDF would have been a far better choice for many reasons. Acrobat even does DRM, which seems to be the main point of using Zinio’s software.
Click the link for my informal review on the app.
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