A web-to-print tool creates personalized magazines

Media & Publishing Published on 7 September 2009 in Media & Publishing

Helping readers take blogs offline, Zinepal lets any user convert their favourite online content into ebooks and printable, magazine-style PDFs.

Users of British Columbia-based Zinepal begin by selecting content they like from blogs, Atom/RSS feeds and other websites. Zinepal then reformats that content into a printable PDF and ebook format for use with the Amazon Kindle and other electronic readers. Users can preview and edit or reformat the resulting "zine," even adding a title and logo of their own to customize the publication. Advertising images can also be included at the bottom of each page. Once their zine is complete, users can print it or request an e-mailed copy; they can also request that new zines be automatically created each day or week from the content they choose. Zines can be made public on the site for sharing and searchability; zine feeds, meanwhile, provide a way for users to offer subscriptions to their publications. There is currently no charge for using Zinepal. A video on blip.tv explains how the process works.

Similar also to BlueMailCentral, Peggy Mail and other tools that help forge the OFF=ON connection, Zinepal gives readers one more choice in deciding how their content is delivered. Even beyond that, though, it has the potential to spawn a whole new generation of small, niche publications similar to the (discontinued) The Printed Blog but put together by independent thinkers, organizations or even brands. One to try out! (Related: Magazine publishing for everyone and every niche.)

Website: www.zinepal.com
Contact: info@zinepal.com

Spotted by: Murtaza Ali Patel

Comments on this idea:

This service looks similar to Tabbloid
http://www.tabbloid.com/

Hi John -- thanks for the reminder! We actually covered Tabbloid last year: http://springwise.com/media_publishing/from_rss_feeds_a_personalized/

Zinepal has quite a few extra features. Its option for sharing zines is an interesting one, letting experts on any imaginable topic become editors of their own niche publications. Bloggers could offer that in edition to their own content, while others might set up an automated zine and send it to their network every week.

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