d other
services. 3,045 zines were listed on November 29, 1998. On the website, John
Labovitz explains:

"What's an 'e-zine', anyway? 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
'z