For those of you not acquainted with the zine world, "zine" is short for either "fanzine" or "magazine," depending on your point of view. Zines are generally produced by one person or a small group of people, done often for fun or personal reasons, and tend to be irreverent, bizarre, and/or esoteric. Zines are not "mainstream" publications -- they generally do not contain advertisements (except, sometimes, advertisements for other zines), are not targeted towards a mass audience, and are generally not produced to make a profit.
An "e-zine" is a zine that is distributed partially or solely on electronic networks like the Internet.
I started this list in the summer of 1993. I was trying to find some place to publicize Crash, a print zine I'd recently made electronic versions of. All I could find was the alt.zines newsgroup and the archives at The WELL and ETEXT. I felt there was a need for something less ephemeral and more organized, a directory that kept track of where e-zines could be found. So I summarized the relevant info from a couple dozen e-zines and created the first version of this list.
Initially, I maintained the list by hand in a text editor; eventually, I wrote my own database program (in the Perl language) that automatically generates all the text, links, and files.
In the four years I've been publishing the list, the net has changed dramatically, in style as well as scale. When I started the list, e-zines were usually a few kilobytes of plain text stored in the depths of an FTP server; high style was having a Gopher menu, and the Web was just a rumor of a myth. The number of living e-zines numbered in the low dozens, and nearly all of them were produced using the classic self-publishing method: scam resources from work when no one's looking.
Now the e-zine world is different. The number of e-zines has increased a hundredfold, crawling out of the FTP and Gopher woodworks to declaring themselves worthy of their own domain name, even of asking for financial support through advertising. Even the term `e-zine' has been co-opted by the commercial world, and has come to mean nearly any type of publication distributed electronically. Yet there is still the original, independent fringe, who continue to publish from their heart, or push the boundaries of what we call a `zine.'
Thanks to Paul Southworth and Rita Rouvalis, maintainers of the ETEXT archive; Jerod Pore, publisher of Factsheetfive-Electric and organizer of The WELL's Publications area; meer.net, who provide the space and resources for this list; and of course, thanks to all the e-zine publishers who made this list possible.
John Labovitz
johnl@johnlabovitz.com / www.johnlabovitz.com