Hypertext poetry

Zines have been around as long as printing presses have been. For most of this century, zines have usually been "fanzines" (a zine about one subject that the creator is a big fan of -- say, Hello Kitty, or Green Day, or Star Trek, or old cars...). But over the last ten years, more and more zines have appeared that are not "fanzines" any more. Most of the zines you'll read about these days are more like mini-magazines, but with a personal touch.”—Action Girl On Line

Zines started as self-published magazines reproduced at the local copy shop and usually distributed through mail order and word of mouth. They would generally be about the author, sex, music, politics, television, movies, work, food, or what ever else the creator thought might (or might not) be interesting. They are a by-product of the age of cheap mechanical reproduction. Anybody could express their obsessions, opinions, perversions, favorite topic, hand drawn graphics or whatever else that could be easily copied. They generally have a homemade punk/angst look to them very much the antithesis of the slick magazines on store shelves.
With the growing popularity of the Internet, ezines began to emerge that would either be delivered through email subscription or else would be posted websites. The websites are a bit different form of ezine as they cannot generate any income for the author (unlike paid subscriptions). As ezines have been taking advantage of the mixed medium of the Internet, they have begun to resemble net.art and net.art exhibitions.
Factsheet Five, the zine that reviews zines, used to ask its readers a deceptively simple question, "Why publish?" and always received passionate and often long-winded, responses. That very same question can still be asked of anyone that publishes on the Internet, and the answers are more important now than ever.