Covermount

The name comes from the method of packaging; the media or product is placed in a transparent plastic sleeve and mounted on the cover of the magazine with adhesive tape or glue.

The Private Eye recordings were pressed onto 7" floppy vinyl (known as "flexi-discs" and "flimsies") and mounted on to the front of the magazine.

In the United Kingdom computer hobbyist magazines began distributing tapes and later floppy disks with their publications.

Instead, popular Finnish magazines such as MikroBitti offered subscribers access to an exclusive BBS via modem, and later via the World Wide Web.

Magazines are also including non-storage media like toys, games, stationery sets, make up, cross stitch kits and whatever the publisher believes will help the sales of their titles.

In the United Kingdom, many television-related "partware" magazines (magazines aimed at collectors which build up to a complete set over months or years) have been launched in recent years, with covermounts containing episodes of the subject show (such as Dad's Army, Stargate SG-1 or The Prisoner).

In April 2007, EMI licensed the Mail on Sunday to cover-mount 2.25 million copies of Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells shortly before the rights on it were due to revert to him, something about which the artist was not best pleased.

Initial magazines, like Amiga Format or ST Format had one or more floppy disks with demos of upcoming games, but the fragility of the media and the increasing size of demos made publishers turn to compact discs, which were cheaper to produce, more resistant to damage, and had over 300 times more capacity.

CDs became the most common storage media, but in the past several years, demos have grown from mere 50MB files to 500MB or larger.

Sensible Software made several games for distribution with Amiga Power, like Sensible Massacre (uses Sensible Soccer graphics, where the player throws grenades at Dutch players, following the loss of England against the Dutch in the USA'94 qualifiers) or Sensible Train Spotting (related to the hobby), the last game developed by the company for the Commodore Amiga.

If a buyer tries to apply a patch or update, there is a high chance of the game not recognizing a covermount CD, as they are often reprints and lack the copy prevention sectors.