The present technology provides a less burdensome mechanism to bring media items owned or licensed in the physical world into an account hosted by an electronic media provider. A specific use case deals with magazine subscriptions wherein the electronic media provider can send entity identifying information to a publisher clearinghouse that has subscription data for many different magazines. If the entity information sufficiently matches subscription information, the clearinghouse sends back data identifying magazines for which the entity is entitled to a digital copy, and these magazines become available to the user through the electronic media provider.