Zines and Small-Press Publishing

There are lots of place you can read digitised zines online if you don't have access to a zine library or collection. Some of these will be from older personal collections which the owner has chosen to digitise and share, some where the creator of the zine has chosen to digitise current or older versions of their zine, and some zines which are born-digital and intended to be read as a digital copy.

There are ethical questions around the digitisation of zines, particularly those in this first category, as it can be difficult to track down authors for permission to share their work due to the ephemeral nature of zines, authors remaining anonymous or using pen-names. Those who digitise zines would argue that they digitise to document a subculture which might otherwise be lost and state that they have tried to track down the creator of the zine and that they are happy to remove digitised editions if they ask them to. There may be good reasons why the author of a zine might not like their zine to be shared online due to the often personal nature of zines, you can read more about that here. Some of these collections will contain zines which have been digitised without direct permission from their creator for the reasons stated above.