Category: publishing

The Atlantic publishes its final issue in Boston, where it has been for 148 years. It now moves to New York. “David Bradley, who owns the Washington-based National Journal Group of publications and bought The Atlantic from Mort Zuckerman in 1999, has built readership up to about 1.5 million, and doubled newsstand sales to close to 60,000. The latest audited circulation is about 405,000, but according to an e-mail from Bradley, the magazine is still losing about $3 million a year.”

The low-tech business of books is looking to some digital strategies for help. “Technology, often declared the enemy of literacy, has been called upon to save it. With hints of optimism and anxiety, publishers are counting on the digital text and digital channels to win over a public drawn to other media.”

“Gimmicky books make awful gifts. Why? Because they’re so much easier to give than they are to receive. They’re so much more gratifying to gift givers than they are to recipients. And the act of follow-through is not often a big part of these transactions. A gift book may be chosen on impulse, but it can confound whoever winds up with it for a long, long time.”

UK book chain Ottakar’s says it can’t compete with big discount chains. “Ottakar’s said like-for-like sales since the end of January had fallen 3.4%, with a marked deterioration from the summer with sales falling by 6.7% despite the release of the latest installment in the Harry Potter saga. Shares in the company, which dropped below 400p this month when a proposed £96m takeover by Waterstone’s was referred to the competition commission, fell a further 2% to 357.5p.”

“A half-century after New York’s Village Voice launched the genre of alternative weeklies, there’s still plenty of war, injustice and corporate domination around. But the anti-establishment counterculture has moved topside. Rock ‘n’ roll jingles hawk luxury cars, mutual funds come with social consciences and alternative weeklies have become a profitable, parallel universe to the mainstream media. In an unmistakable sign that the counterculture has morphed into corporate culture,” now two “alt-weekly” chains are merging…

George Ramsden, a British bookseller, has signed “a $2.6 million agreement to sell the 2,600-volume Edith Wharton library to the custodians of the Mount, the writer’s estate in Lenox, Mass., which she designed, built and finally left forever in 1911 as her marriage unraveled.”

“A study published Dec. 14 by the journal Nature found that in a random sample of 42 science entries, Wikipedia had an average of just one more inaccuracy per entry than the Encyclopedia Britannica. Nature also polled more than 1,000 scientists who have published papers in Nature’s prestigious pages and found that 17% consulted Wikipedia on a weekly basis.”

A ten-year-old girl’s book about surviving her parents’ divorce has been picked up by a publisher. “When her mother and father separated three and a half years ago Libby Rees wrote a list of the things that helped her make sense of what was going on. The result was a 60-page book called Help, Hope and Happiness, published by Aultbea Publishing based in Inverness.”

Even as owner David Bradley is moving the Atlantic magazine out of Boston, he’s starting another magazine in Boston. This one is a publication for Harvard alums only. “It’s certainly an original gambit, to market a subscription-based magazine to a group that outsiders can’t join. Alumni magazines typically lose plenty of money, and it’s hard to see who would want to read this one, apart from the not-inconsiderable universe of narcissistic Harvard graduates.

After seeing big circulation increases earlier this year American celebrity magazines have seen some shrp declines. “Us has seen the steepest drop-off, with fourth-quarter sales running about 15 percent below its January-through-September average. People is down about 9 percent; Star, 8 percent, and In Touch, 5 percent, said sources. (People, Us and In Touch are all on pace to report a year-over-year increase for the second half as a whole, however; Star will be slightly down.)”