John Labovitz's e-zine-list

» see meer.net/~johnl/e-zine-list as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Every edition of the e-zine-list told you its own size. "This edition was updated 21 Jan 1999 and contains 3022 zines." The last one Labovitz compiled is dated 08 Mar 2000 and counts 4392. Nothing new went up after that, though the page kept regenerating for four more years with the number drifting downward as dead zines fell off the end: 4370 in November 2001, 4338 in March 2004.

It began in the summer of 1993 as a plain text file. Labovitz and two friends were publishing a zine called Crash, electronically, and he wanted somewhere to announce it, so he wrote down the others he knew about. The oldest copy he kept is dated 3 September 1993. By 1996 the list was past 750 titles and the Washington Post was writing about the e-zine explosion with his directory as its index of the thing; by the start of 1999 it was past 3,000. It described itself as a list of electronic zines "around the world, accessible via the Web, FTP, email, and other services", browsable by title or by keyword, with a submission form at one end and a survey at the other.

What the list was for has to be explained now. There was no search engine worth the name for this material, and the zines themselves were scattered across FTP sites and personal pages, with no shared format and no shared host. If you wanted to find small independent publishing on the internet, the way you did it was to read somebody's list. This was the one people read.

I got online in 1998, at 33.6k, from Turkey, which means the e-zine-list was already five years old and near its peak before I could have found it. I did not find it. What I had instead were Turkish forums, and the nearest equivalent was somebody's page of links. The culture this indexed was almost entirely English-language, so I know it the way you know a city from a map.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ time to move on ~

The closing note went up under that title some time in the first half of 2000 and was on the site by 19 June. It has aged strangely well. "With some regret and a small breath of relief, I am ending active maintenance of the e-zine-list", he writes, then translates it himself: "that's a long-winded way of saying that I ain't runnin' it no more."

He gives two reasons. The first is that his own attention had moved, "the shifting nature of the net, and the shifting nature of my personal passions". The second is about what had happened to the material he was indexing: "I have also seen the shadow of marketing and money overwhelm much of what was truly creative and inspirational, to replace it with only dull commercialism and spam." That was written in 2000 by a man who had first gone online in 1982.

Then the passage that explains the next four years. He would not simply delete it, because "I would feel unworthy simply shutting down the list, deleting the files, turning off the lights, and locking the door." He wanted to donate the contents and the name to someone who would keep it non-commercial, said outright that he was not interested in selling to a company, and asked especially to hear from people in zines and independent publishing. Until he found one, the list would stay frozen at the same address with submissions suspended.

~ the handover ~

It took until June 2004. The page announced that a cooperative called Thank You But No was taking over, and the old address at meer.net shrank to a single paragraph pointing at e-zine-list.com. The new owners rebuilt it with a search engine, which is the one feature Labovitz had joked about wishing he had. That version answered until about 2014. The domain is dead now, and the only complete copy of either one is in the archive.

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