In this category ZineDB is a magazine trading website. We aim to make magazine sales liquid, easily sold and bought, and at the same time build up a much-needed magazine database. (If you've been on Amazon, you'll see that putting in a magazine name plus the word 'magazine', simply fails to find anything remotely magazine-ey. This is because though books have a centralised database, magazines don't).
We're not talking just magazines from the past 5 years, but all general periodical publications since the 18th century. Typically 'legal' or 'A4' size.
We won't let you sell books, however. There are plenty of websites to let you do that.
Now to describe how it all works...
Basically, there is a database. If you list (or 'sell') an issue, you are asked for data about that issue, and that data goes in the database. However, you can voluntarily submit data to the database.
We want to build up a database of the following tables:
Articles | These are magazine articles |
Authors | The writers of articles |
Issues | Individual issues of magazines |
Magazines | Data about a magazine, which is published by a publisher, and comprises a number of issues. This is called a 'Title' internally, but you see it referred to as 'Magazine'. |
Pages | Data about individual pages |
Publishers | Data about the companies that sell magazines |
There are 2 roles: Seller and Buyer. A Seller lists items and sets the price. The Buyer searches for the magazines they want to find. If they find an item and like the price, there is a sale from the Seller to the Buyer. Payment by Paypal or Bitcoin. One clever idea is that of specifying countries in your listings. Someone in Sweden posting a magazine to Sweden, is obviously cheaper than from Sweden to Britain.
Shipping costs are estimated by the ZineDB founder taking a generic magazine to the post office and getting it weighed, from the United Kingdom to within the United Kingdom. This is then fixed as the price of shipping a magazine within the UK.
Say the generic cost of UK to UK is £1.50. The seller thus cannot charge more or less - for posting 1 issue - than £1.50.
This means you don't get scammed on shipping: There is neither free postage nor high-cost postage.
We have made sure the site is usable on mobile devices and screen readers (or old browsers).
The menu at the top can be turned into a list menu by clicking here.
When submitting an issue, you can take a photo of the magazine's front cover with your phone, and upload it to the website, no trouble!
Finally, all forms and search results can be simply scrolled left or right. If you switch the aspect ratio to landscape, it almost all fits horizontally.
When you register for an account on ZineDB - which allows you to submit data and sell magazines - You give us a username and password, and email address, and if we approve of your application, we make your account live.
Once live, you login via the front page. Enter your username and password. It says 'Remember Me'. If you don't tick this, closing your browser logs you out (cookies are cleaned out). If you do tick it, your login lasts about a year (cookies last a year).
When done, click 'Logout'. This clears all cookies from the system and takes you back to the front page to either login again, or just browse and do those searches which don't require being logged in.
(All database tables are (c) 2017 ZineDB).
As we saw above, there are 6 database tables in the database. These are their descriptions:
Magazine | The name of the magazine the article is from. |
Issue Number | The issue. Issue 1 is the first issue. |
Volume Number | The volume, which is typically 1 volume per year. |
Page | The page number of the article's first page. |
Author | The name of the author of the article (say, Jenkins). |
Title | Not the magazine, but the title of the article. |
Summary | A description of the article (longer than the title). |
Public Domain | Is this article freely copyable? |
URL | The URL pointing to the text of the article. |
Name | Name of the author. |
Email of the author. | |
Birthday | Birthday of the author (as a date). |
Magazine | Title of the magazine (eg, 'Red Herring'). |
Issue Number | The issue. Issue 1 is the first issue. |
Volume Number | The volume, which is typically 1 volume per year. |
Page | The number of pages in this issue. |
Issue Date | The date when the issue came out |
Cover Media | 1 for a cover CD/DVD/disk/tape, 0 for nothing |
Price | Original price of the issue |
Public Domain | Is the whole of this issue freely copyable? |
ISSN | The ISSN number |
URL | A URL to this issue online |
Torrent URL | A URL to a torrent of this issue |
Filename in Torrent | The filename to a file in the above torrent |
Front cover | Upload a JPEG of the front cover |
Magazine | Title of the magazine (eg, 'Red Herring'). |
Publisher | Publisher of the magazine (eg 'Newsfield'). |
Public Domain | Is this magazine - all its issues- freely copyable? |
Launch Date | Date of the 1st issue |
URL | Official website of the magazine. |
Torrent | A URL to a torrent of this magazine |
Magazine | Title of the magazine (eg, 'Red Herring'). |
Issue Number | The issue. Issue 1 is the first issue. |
Volume Number | The volume, which is typically 1 volume per year. |
Page Number | The number of the page in question. |
Advert | Is this page an advert? |
Public Domain | Is the text of this page freely copyable? |
URL | A URL pointing to the text - or an image or PDF - of this page. |
Torrent URL | A torrent pointing to this page. |
Torrent Filename | Above torrent has this page in this filename. |
Name | Name of the publisher (eg, 'Newsfield'). |
Phone | Phone number of the publisher (eg, 290 200 3939). |
Country | Country the publisher resides in (Eg, 'USA') |
State | County or state the publisher resides in (Eg, 'California') |
City | Eg, Los Angeles |
Zip | Eg NY 20000 |
Street | Eg, Wall Street |
Eg, contact@magazine.com | |
Fax | Fax number |
URL | Publisher's official (or unofficial) website. |
It's not as easy as with a mobile phone.
First, go through steps 1-4 below.
You can scan the front cover of the magazine with a flatbed scanner, and then hit 'Browse'. You then navigate My Computer to find the scanned image.
The 2nd way is with a digital camera. Again, hit 'Browse'. Take a photo of the front cover, then plug the camera into the PC, go to My Computer, then the name of the camera, and go in folder 'DCIM'. Or, you can take the SD card out of the camera and pop that in your PC, then navigate My Computer to find it.
Once the front cover is done, continue below at step 7.
It's simple!
Now the issue is in the database, you can sell it here.
Menu Sell -> Add Issues for Sale | |
Next, to filter out issues you want to sell, refine the search fields: | |
Next, choose the issue you want to sell: | |
Now put in the data regarding the issue you are selling (note: Issue ID is filled in automatically): | |
Click Sell Issue and You're Done! |
Just a note: The 'Sell Issue' table has a field called 'Upload Table of Contents'. You take a photo or scan the magazine's table of contents, and upload this. Basically, it is an anti-fraud protection system.
How To Use: | Instructions for the website. |
Search: | Search any of the tables in the database, with a form to indicate the search parameters. |
Add: | Lets you add a table row to the indicated database table. A form is filled in, and if the data is adequate, the row is added to the indicated table. |
Buy: | Every page relevant to purchasing items. |
Sell: | Every page relevant to selling items. |
Contact: | Contact the site administrator |
Account: | All to do with logging in and out. And also, to register a new user if none exists. |
Basically, this unhides a bunch of text boxes (or 'fields').
When you add to the database, all the fields you can see are mandatory in that you MUST supply all the data there. Everything else - when toggled - is optional. You don't have to supply any data in those, it's optional.
When you search, it says 'Optional fields' but really it means, the fields you can see let you search minimally, but the extra fields will show data that NOT EVERYONE has submitted. In other words, you'll be searching for data which will be less frequent than the mandatory fields, so you won't get as many hits.
If you put nothing in any search field - like the Author name - it just finds every author as the results.
This is the same for all search forms.
Every submission to the database, stores the user ID of the person to submit that entry - and stores the time & date of the submission.
This person can view all their own submissions, and there are a few hyperlinks on the right of the table:
The 'Required' fields mean that you have to have valid data in every one of these slots to be considered valid.
If the 'Required' field is bold, this means that those bold entries are considered a 'duplicate'. If a submission is made twice, it will tell you that the item already exists.
Eg, the publisher form has these minimal fields:
Here, the name 'Red Herring' and the country 'USA' will constitute a duplicate if both match the existing database entry.
It's easy to delete any of your submissions.
You must be logged in.
To delete any item you have on sale, go to Menu Sell -> See My Issues on Sale. Click 'Delete' on right-hand side of the screen to delete a single item.
To delete an item from your shopping cart, go to Menu Buy -> View My Shopping Cart. Click 'Delete' on right-hand side of the screen to delete a single item.
To delete anything else you have submitted, go to Menu Account -> See All My Submissions. Click 'Delete' on right-hand side of the screen to delete a single item.
You can't delete more than 1 item at a time. This will be fixed soon.
You will be selling issues, a physical copy of a magazine. You cannot buy or sell pages, articles, or (in the collective sense) magazines.
It's free to sell, and there are no transaction fees.
A cookie is a bit of data in your browser on your computer, which stores data securely, that a program on this website can read and write.
Our cookies are:
Every page of ZineDB accesses these cookies without revealing any personal data or even the username or password.
No script will clash with each other script using the same cookies.
Because of this cookie use, you can skip between pages - and always click on the 'Back' button - without worrying about breaking something.
You'll be pleased to know that we have SSL enabled, so all your transactions are secure, and safe from prying eyes.
Make sure there's a little green padlock left of the URL.
Make sure it says 'https' not 'http' as the 's' means it's secure.