Whither zines
Jan. 21st, 2007 03:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
randy_byersSo in the comments to my previous post, I wondered whether non-SF zines were struggling with digital formats as well. Lo and behold, in the latest issue of David Burton's PDFzine Pixel, he comments on this very question:
Mainstream zines took their inspiration and concept from SF zines, and from what I’ve seen I don’t think they’ve done much innovation in the overall model, actually. Certainly they’ve moved it to other genres, and in some cases maybe taken the format in different directions. I’m not sure how healthy the “zine scene” really is these days. From what I can tell, it isn’t much healthier than our fanzine arena – if anything, mundane zines have shifted even more than fanzines to the paperless digital models. They seem to have by-passed the “digital/paper” idea I was talking about altogether and are either still deadtree or are published as Web sites or blogs – there doesn’t seem to be the middle ground (of PDFs substituting for paper) that you find in fanzines today.
He has some interesting things to say about design in fanzines too. The whole interview is worth a read, and he's certainly doing the most interesting design in the PDFzines I've looked at.
Mainstream zines took their inspiration and concept from SF zines, and from what I’ve seen I don’t think they’ve done much innovation in the overall model, actually. Certainly they’ve moved it to other genres, and in some cases maybe taken the format in different directions. I’m not sure how healthy the “zine scene” really is these days. From what I can tell, it isn’t much healthier than our fanzine arena – if anything, mundane zines have shifted even more than fanzines to the paperless digital models. They seem to have by-passed the “digital/paper” idea I was talking about altogether and are either still deadtree or are published as Web sites or blogs – there doesn’t seem to be the middle ground (of PDFs substituting for paper) that you find in fanzines today.
He has some interesting things to say about design in fanzines too. The whole interview is worth a read, and he's certainly doing the most interesting design in the PDFzines I've looked at.
