Q: What do you get if you cross the internet and magazines?
A: Ivan Pope.
Pope is a former zinester who created the world’s first internet magazine, The World Wide Web Newsletter (later 3W Magazine), in 1993. He later went on to help launch the first consumer magazine about the web, .net, and also invented the cybercafé as part of an installation at the ICA in London.
He’s now turned his entrepreneurial zeal to creating Magazero, an online magazine store dedicated to “gathering the best, freshest, strangest, most inaccessible, juciest, loveliest independent magazines from around the world and bringing them into your life.”
Magtastic talked to him about the future of magazine selling, setting up a competitor to Stack, and the glory of the magazine ecosystem.
What made you want to set up an online magazine shop?
I’ve wanted to open a magazine shop for about fifteen years now. In the nineties, I had an internet business with an office in New York (domain names; I sort of invented that industry). I used to spend a lot of time there and one thing I loved were the magazine shops with floor to ceiling racks of every magazine you could imagine. I always thought it would be a great thing to open something similar in the UK.
