What Will Magazine Publishing Be Like in 2020? January 14

By a strange coincidence, four separate events on the same day pretty much tell you everything you need to know about magazine media in 2020.

Not un-undead yet

I could have just waited a few hours and let the events of the day do the talking.

Early the morning of January 14, when I submitted my 2020 magazine-publishing forecast to Publishing Executive, I had no idea the day would foretell what lies ahead for magazine media.

Within a few hours of me finishing that article, four different announcements provided glimpses into what’s in store for publishing this year. (PubExec added notes about two of the announcements before publishing my article.):

1) Change of Fortune
The New York Post revealed changes in store for Fortune magazine that checked off three boxes in my forecast: a “tiered paywall” on its web site, reduced frequency for its magazine, and upgrading of its paper. It didn’t take a crystal ball to see that those three trends from 2019 would continue into this year.

2) Chopping plants
LSC Communications, one of the two megaprinters that dominate U.S. magazine printing, announced the closure of three magazine and catalog printing plants, including one of the nation’s largest. My article noted that “heavily indebted LSC was left in a weakened state” and is “shaky,” but I wasn’t expecting such a swift, radical downsizing.

All three plants were noted for producing relatively large-circulation magazines, including some with print orders in the millions. Their closure underscores a theme that will continue to play out in 2020: Magazines are nearly dead as a mass medium; the future lies in niches.

3) Paper cuts 
Resource Recycling published an article pointing out that Verso Corp. had stepped up its plans to shift some production capacity at its Duluth mill from supercalendered papers to packaging papers.

Verso’s original plan was to start making 48,000 tons of packaging papers starting early this year, but in a recent financial filing it raised that number to 90,000. And it said that might be just the first step to a complete conversion that would eliminate production of printing papers.

Like LSC’s giant, doomed Mattoon plant, Duluth’s strong point is rotogravure products, which are typically used for publications and newspaper inserts having print orders in the millions. No wonder Verso would rather use the mill to make cardboard.

Duluth’s gradual conversion probably won’t rile the paper market. But, publishers beware: I believe other such machine conversions are likely to cause some sort of paper shortage this year, as explained in the PubExec article.

4) Zombie renaissance
Meredith Corporation had its struggles last year, but its zombie resurrection strategy wins my vote for New Business Model of the Year. It revealed a new twist in that strategy on (when else?) January 14 in announcing the new Rachael Ray In Season quarterly bookazines.

Just a few months ago, Meredith “zombified” Rachel Ray Every Day -- killing off the monthly magazine and transferring its subscribers to other Meredith titles, while keeping it undead with occasional newsstand-only issues.

Light my fire? No thanks

Last week’s announcement didn’t go full zombie resurrection, since there was no reference to subscriptions. However, the commitment to a quarterly publication schedule of seasonally themed issues and the emphasis on advertisers (bookazines usually contain few if any ads) suggest that the Princess of Perky may once again have a real magazine.

This time, though, it’s likely to be more of a niche effort, with a target circulation that’s only a fraction of the million-plus numbers of Rachael Ray Every Day's zenith. And, of course, it will have a higher price, more pages, lower frequency, and better paper than its predecessor.

Bonus prediction: Don't hold your breath waiting for Rach to start hawking vagina-scented candles. Goop is going to have the monopoly on that one.  
 
Other Dead Tree Edition commentaries on the "magazine media" industry include:

• Meredith's TIME Management Problem
• Need a Loan? Subscribe to a Magazine
• Which of These Headlines Is Defamatory?

 

Color It Dead: The Coloring Book Bubble Has Burst

Stick a crayon in it: The adult coloring book craze is dead.

Coloring books with grown-up themes were the hot item of 2016 for both brick-and-mortar bookstores and for retail sales of magazines.

Publishers eagerly jumped aboard the bandwagon, cranking out new products in a category that’s well-suited to analog, in-person sales and definitely ill-suited to electronic editions. (Seen a Kindle edition of a coloring book lately?)

Now many stores have grown wary of the category, as sales plummet and inventory stacks up, according to book-industry sources.

Barnes & Noble reported that coloring books were the main reason its Sterling Publishing Co.’s sales grew 22% in the year that ended on April 30, 2016 – and declined 20% during the following nine months.

Recently, B&N management reportedly told its buyers to put the kibosh on bringing in any more adult coloring books, "with rare exceptions." Other retailers are predicting their 2017 book sales will be down versus last year because of the coloring book crash.

Data about sales of adult coloring bookazines distributed via the “newsstand” (magazine retail) system are harder to come by. Magazine publishers were later to the party than book publishers, but many still profited for a while.

The MagNet newsstand-analysis service reported in early 2016 that the category was growing in both titles and unit sales, “with many releases selling over 125,000 copies on the newsstand at higher cover prices.”

But the coloring book trend seems to have cooled off, if not crashed, for magazine publishers as well. No longer does every industry conferences include a speaker telling us that the way to stop the newsstand system from circling the drain is to publish more adult coloring books.

And Cosmo never did publish the Kama Sutra Coloring Book, packaged with a box of 24 different "Flesh Tone" Crayolas, that I was so hoping for.

My friends in the book trade say the Next Big Thing is joke books. Some will say the magazine industry got a jump on that trend with all the special issues about President Trump. (But I, for one, am not laughing.)

Related articles: 

• A Glimmer of Growth Amidst the Newsstand's Gloom 
• Sales of Printed Books Are Growing? Impossible!
• Books: Amazon's Big Mac

For Magazines, This Will Be the Summer of Trump

I'm a huge fan of the silly, fake news stories published every April Fools Day by printing-industry web site WhatTheyThink? Last year's "50 shades of grayscale" piece had me rolling on the floor. 

I agreed to join in the fun and contribute an article to this year's April Fools Edition. That, in turn, inspired more ideas for fiction-is-barely-stranger-than-truth articles. Here's the first one:

Wait 'til you see the sequel!

Buoyed by the pre-publication success of A Child’s First Book of Trump, the American magazine industry is planning a host of special Trump-themed issues for this summer.

Industry sources say they have seen cover mockups this week for several Trump-inspired bookazines, including a “Color Me Orange” adult coloring book, The Family Handyman’s “DIY Walls”, Celebrity Hairstyles’ “Sexy Combovers,” and a new annual, “The Almanac of American Bankruptcies.”

Newsweek is reportedly in negotiations with the Trump campaign to write a sequel to its “Your Amazing Body” bookazine that will be called “My Amazing Body.” And Life is already going the sequel route, with a follow-up to its “Strange But True” issue.

Playboy, meanwhile, is developing a "Trumpazine" to be called "Schlonged: The Nearly Naked Guide to The Donald's Wives, Girlfriends, and One-Night Stands."

What about New KKKids on the Block?
Just yesterday, Rolling Stone blasted out a “small hands on deck” memo to its music writers to get cracking on a special issue focusing on Trump tribute bands. Featured groups will include Bad Companies; The Notorious B.I.G.O.T; Bare Naked First Lady; Earth, Wind, and You’re Fired; The Sexist Pistols; The Whites-Only Stripes, Rage Against the Muslims; Hair Supply; and Third Eye Reich. A photo essay will take readers into the recording studio where Pink Fraud is recording “Another Prick in the Wall.”

Same headline on the sequel

A Fast Company editor confirmed that the new-age business title is working on a special called “You’re Fired: The Brand Called ‘You’ Is a Real Loser.” And The Bridge World is working on its first-ever bookazine, to be called simply “Trumped”.

The Trumpification of the magazine industry started early this week when newsstand consultant Joe (“Mr. Foredeck”) Berger tweeted, “Holy smokes! ‘A Child’s 1st Book of Trump’ is for real! So that means the #bookazine is not all that far behind.”

“It was a joke,” Berger says. Never mind. Publishers, never wanting to miss out on a “huge” trend or on another way to undercut sales of their regular monthly and weekly titles, quickly jumped on the bandwagon.

Trumpmania is even creating some strange bedfellows: Ebony and People En Espanol are reportedly collaborating for the first time -- on a special bilingual guide to living and working in Canada.

Bare Shelves in the Magazine Aisle

There's nothing "OK!" about these magazine racks.

Here’s how a store’s checkout racks and magazine aisle look after going weeks without delivery of magazines.

Magazines strike out at checkout.

While most grocery and book stores this week were sporting July issues, this CVS store on the East Coast was stuck with May and June copies of monthlies and and a few early-May issues of weekly magazines. Thank God for bookazines, which stay on sale at least a couple of months, or else the entire magazine section would have looked even more barren.

CVS had the misfortune (or poor judgment) less than a year ago to go all in on magazine distribution with Source Interlink, which collapsed last month and Monday went Chapter 22 (its second trip through Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization).

Bookazines fill the void.

Any solution for Source-tied retailers like CVS will inevitably involve the country’s largest wholesaler, TNG. But it will take weeks for TNG to bulk up its distribution network to handle the majority of Source’s former customers.

Complicating the move is that TNG is demanding that publishers sign off on new terms, which include new fees and a transition to “pay on scan.” Source and TNG both apparently ran into trouble by grabbing market share with agreements to pay retailers based on the number of copies rung up at cash registers, not the number that were distributed but never returned.

Empty slots and out-of-date issues

Without reciprocal agreements from publishers, the two big wholesalers have been squeezed by the “shrink” – copies that are stolen, lost, or damaged. TNG now seems to have the power to impose pay-on-scan for publishers, including compensation to publishers for estimated shrink.

Meanwhile, the magazine racks at many stores, especially in former Source strongholds in the Midwest, are being depleted. Will they remain empty until the industry is ready to deliver its product once again, or will impatient retailers just turn the space over to other products that are probably less profitable but also more reliable?

Related articles:

• A Glimmer of Hope Amidst the Newsstand’s Gloom 
• Publishers Hope Threesome Will Perk Up Newsstand Sales 
• Shootout at the Newsstand

Old Ladies' Journal Sent to the Home

The 131-year-old “Seven Sister” title Ladies' Home Journal was consigned today to the magazine industry’s version of the old folks’ home – “special interest publication.”

Meredith announced it will discontinue publishing the 3.2-million-circulation magazine as a monthly and transfer its subscribers to other Meredith titles.

This promo was still on LHJ.com hours after the announcement.

LHJ will travel the same path as some other venerable titles whose audiences became a bit too venerable for advertisers’ tastes – such as Life, U.S. News & World Report, and Country Home: The LHJ brand will appear in print only on newsstand-oriented special-interest publications, often referred to as bookazines because of their lack of advertising, high prices, and focus on a single theme.

Meredith was mum on the future of the magazine's web site, which was still promoting a cheap subscription offer hours after the magazine's demise was announced.

The magazine “has been challenged from an advertising perspective, in particular, primarily due to its higher-than-normal, if you will, median age, which takes it out of a number of the buys,” Stephen M. Lacy, chairman and CEO, said during a conference call today, according to a transcript published by SeekingAlpha. (In the inimitable, no-BS words of The Ad Contrarian: “Marketers, it seems, would rather pander fruitlessly to young people than make real money selling things to old people.”)

“So the objective here and the strategy here is to continue to make the brand available to the individual consumer who has been loyal to Ladies' Home Journal by moving it to a newsstand-only publication,” Lacy added.

That makes sense, considering the title's continued strength at retail: An Association of Audited Media Report showed average newsstand sales of 131,212 per issue in the second half of last year, up 4% over 2012 despite continued shrinkage of newsstand venues.

The transition “significantly eliminates any advertising dependency and a lot of the costs that go along with creating that business,” Lacy said. “It allows us to take those resources and focus them on our very robust parenthood category, where we absolutely lead with the Parents brand and related brands: American Baby, FamilyFun, Family Circle, in the home category with Better Homes and Gardens and all those related activities.”

It’s sort of like starving gramma so you can feed the babies.

The injection of nearly 3 million subscribers transitioned from LHJ will also create a windfall for other Meredith titles. They will be spared from some of the usual low-ball pricing, gimmicks, and direct-mail campaigns that consumer publications so often need to maintain their high circulation levels.

But it's not good news for everyone, of course. More than 100 jobs are being eliminated at the magazine, which spent north of $9 million annually on Periodicals mail, plus additional for letter mail, according to Postcom. Dead Tree Edition estimates the magazine was using well over 6,000 tons of coated paper annually.

Related articles:

• Invasion of the Bookazines, Featuring the Return of the Living Dead   
• My Heartfelt Apology to the Publishing Industry
• A Glimmer of Growth Amidst the Newsstand's Gloom

A Glimmer of Growth Amidst the Newsstand's Gloom

Despite continuing declines in North American newsstand sales the past few years, one category has experienced steady, impressive growth: bookazines.

Unit sales of the special issues in the U.S. and Canada grew at nearly an 11% annual rate from 2008 to 2012, with annual revenue up 80%, according to data presented recently by MagNet, an industry consortium.

During the same period, total unit sales of magazines decreased about 10% annually. The trend of rising bookazine sales and decreasing overall sales is continuing this year.

"If print is dead and newsstand is dead, why is it that consumers will plunk down and make an impulsive purchase to spend 10 or 12 bucks to buy a high-quality publication at the newsstand?"asked Gil Brechtel, MagNet's president, at the Magazine Innovation Center's recent Act 4 Experience conference. (Brechtel's presentation begins at about the 30-minute mark of this video.)

Bookazines, also known as book-a-zines, mooks, SIPs, one-shots, or special issues, are non-subscription publications sold via the newsstand system. They are usually published by subscription magazines, but some are published under such non-magazine brands as Philadelphia Cream Cheese, USA Today, and the American Bible Society. Brechtel's definition of "book-a-zine" includes only titles having a cover price of at least $9.99, which is probably the vast majority of special issues.

"During 2012 there were 900 bookazines released," Brechtel said. "Some did very well. Some didn't do so well." They generated $352 million in retail sales, a 20% increase over 2011. Typical subject matter included tributes to dead celebrities, in-depth looks at a single topic, and recipe books -- lots of recipe books. The top seller was a National Geographic title that brought in almost $3 million.

"Why are people buying $10 bookazines full of information they can get free on the web?" he asked. "A lot of these are coffeetable books."

The formula for bookazine success, according to Brechtel, is strong brands, high-quality cover and paper stock, and appealing content. Bookazines have the advantage of avoiding a major cause of declining retail sales -- low-ball subscription offers.

"Publishers are trying to chase ratebase so much they're basically giving magazines for free or for a very low price," Brechtel said. "If you buy Cosmopolitan 12 issues for $5 a year why in heck would you spend $3.95 for one issue?"

Bookazines accounted for more than 10% of total newsstand sales last year, and that share seems to be growing rapidly. At a couple of stores I visited recently, it was hard to find actual weekly or monthly magazines amidst all the special issues.

At Target recently: An issue of TIME surrounded by bookazines.

One advantage of the special issues is that they don't go "stale" quickly and can remain on sale for up to three months, versus a month or less for regular issues.

But that's not relevant to all locations: As some stores shrink the amount of space for magazines (though it's the most profitable category for supermarkets), there's increased pressure to turn inventory over quickly, even for successful, high-priced titles.

Related articles:

• Invasion of the Bookazines, Featuring the Return of the Living Dead 
• Mooks and Canucks: The Bookazine Invasion Crosses the Border
• Rupert, Weiner and Cardboard Animals: 5 Who Should Be Ahead of Me on RISI’s Top 50 Power List
• 8 Questions About Newsweek's Future

8 Questions About Newsweek's Future

Google News indicates that more than 1,000 articles were published Thursday about Newsweek magazine abandoning print but continuing as the digital Newsweek Global. Still, many questions remain unanswered, including: 

Recent Newsweek cover -- and a parody

1. Will some of the millions of dollars no longer being forked over to the U.S. Postal Service, paper mills, and printers be reinvested in more and better content? 
2. Will Newsweek Global’s covers still inspire hilarious parodies? Or will lack of visibility at airports, grocery stores, and dentists’ offices mean its covers will no longer matter, regardless how hard Tina Brown tries?
3. What will happen to current subscribers who don’t have internet or computer access or just don’t want a digital publication? Will they get their money back? 
4. How will advertisers respond to Newsweek Global and its lack of ratebase (guaranteed minimum circulation)? 
5. What does this mean for TIME magazine? Will it benefit from its archrival’s loss of visibility, or will it get sucked down the same toilet? 
6. Will Newsweek Global be only a digital magazine – for example, with numbered pages and a regular publication schedule? Or will some subscribers view its content on an unpaginated, paywall-protected web site that is continuously updated? 
7. Is Newsweek truly abandoning print, or will it become a zombie on newsstands like Life and U.S. News & World Report, living on in “bookazines” (special issues)? 
8. Will Newsweek Global survive? 

Added thought: It turns out the Mayans weren't quite right: 2012 isn't the end of Time, it's the end of Newsweek.

Related articles:

• Newsweek Takes a Stand: Profits Are for Wimps
• What Exactly Did Barry Diller Say About Newsweek's Future?  
• Tina Brown Follows Husband's Footsteps -- Sort Of

Print Is Dead? Not For This Growing Publication Niche

Here’s a factoid that defies the conventional wisdom about printed magazines being passé and the U.S. newsstand system having one foot in the grave: Sales of bookazines are up nearly 20% this year, according to industry consortium MagNet.

“These results seem to contradict what the industry press has long decided, that digital is killing print,” MagNet, which reports on retail sales of magazines, wrote recently in its client newsletter. "Even in these tough economic times, consumers are willing to purchase high quality publications that provide subject matter that appeals to them, even at higher cover prices.”

Pique Their Interest, Take Their Money
The lesson: “If you produce high quality titles that peek [sic] consumers' interest, even with higher cover prices, you can make money selling them almost exclusively from the newsstand, even with limited advertising revenues.”

MagNet defines a “book-a-zine” as “an issue that was not part of a title's normal frequency schedule and has a cover price between $9.95 - $19.99.” It calculates 2010 sales at just over $400 million, with some individual books bringing in well over $1 million. First-half 2011 sales were $236 million, according to MagNet, putting the niche on track to reach $500 million for the full year

Dead Tree Edition’s definition of bookazines (AKA mooks, SIPs, one-shots, specials; See Invasion of the Bookazines, Featuring the Return of the Living Dead) is broader, encompassing any non-periodical that retailers display in their magazine sections for a limited period of time. That includes products sold for less than $9.95 and those published by non-periodical brands like Pillsbury, Life, and The Old Farmer’s Almanac.

The number of bookazine titles is increasing, apparently because the products are profitable for publishers, wholesalers, and retailers, according to MagNet. After all, the price points are much higher than for typical monthly or weekly issues, the products have a longer shelf life, and no blow-in card falls out of them saying, “You idiot. For what you just spent for this magazine, we would have gladly sold you a six-month subscription. (Allow 6-8 weeks for delivery.)”

More Share of Shelf?
MagNet doesn’t comment on whether mooks are gaining “share of shelf” on the newsstand, but with their growth and profitability it seems likely that the “invasion of the bookazines” is contributing to declining sales for regular magazine issues.

There’s also no commentary on what kind of content is selling well. Dead Tree Edition's unscientific analysis finds that many mooks play to at least one of print’s strengths – such as beautiful photography, collectability, recipes (ever spilled Alfredo sauce on an iPad?), or content that lends itself to being highlighted or Post-It Noted.

MagNet thinks publishers have not tapped the advertising potential of bookazines. The challenge, industry insiders tell me, is that bookazine sales are notoriously difficult to predict; print advertisers are used to a guaranteed ratebase. Perhaps the problem could be solved by selling bookazine ads like web ads – on a CPM basis, where the exact number of impressions (books sold) doesn’t have to be known or guaranteed up front.

Or maybe they could be sold like ads in apps: “This is cool. This is cutting edge. You gotta advertise in this. Audience metrics? Fuhgeddaboudit."

Related article: Mooks and Canucks: The Bookazine Invasion Crosses the Border.

Mooks and Canucks: The Bookazine Invasion Crosses the Border

Barely a week after Dead Tree Edition chronicled the rise of bookazines at U.S. newsstands, word comes that the hybrid publications are on the march in Canada as well.

"Special interest publications -- spinoffs from a core magazine -- are definitely a growth area for traditional publishers," the Canadian Magazines blog quotes Maryam Sanati of Toronto Life telling a meeting of Toronto editors.

Her advice includes "build on your publication's core competencies," "repurpose what you can from the main book", and "be as specific as possible." Sanati's formula for SIPs: "Very specific, very vertical = very successful."

Her goal is to meet the needs of specific consumers so well that "the newsstand-only products leap off the racks."

That raises a question relevant to both Canadian and U.S. bookazines: Why do we refer to them as “newsstand-only” books when we publishers claim to have gone multimedia and multichannel? Why aren’t we calling them “non-subscription” products and selling them on the Web and in editions for Nook, Kindle, iPad, etc.?

Invasion of the Bookazines, Featuring the Return of the Living Dead

Blame it on the mooks and their zombie buddies.

Because of all the doom and gloom about the U.S. newsstand system (you know it’s bad when an industry consultant’s blog is called From the Foredeck of the Titanic), Dead Tree Edition decided to launch an in-depth investigation. Which means I ventured out to the magazine sections of three stores.

I was trying to figure out why, as MediaPost reported recently, the combined retail sales of 68 major magazines are barely half of what they were a decade ago. It wasn’t hard to spot one of the culprits.

At first, all seemed OK when I eyed the prominently placed magazine section in a big discount store. There were lots of familiar titles – National Geographic, TIME, Us, Readers Digest, and Better Homes & Gardens. But a closer look showed they were impostors.

The well-known magazine logos weren’t on magazines at all but on mooks – AKA bookazines, SIPs (single interest publications), one-shots, or specials. By whatever name you call them, they are sold in the magazine section of stores but have no specific issue date, can’t be obtained as part of a subscription, and tend to hone in on a single topic that’s in keeping with the magazine’s brand --like Christmas Cooking from Better Homes & Gardens, Us: Stars of 2011, or TIME’s Beyond 9/11: Portraits of Resilience.

Mook sales are usually excluded from the industry statistics reported by the trade press.

The intruders mostly have the same characteristics – little or no advertising, glossy high-quality paper, perfect binding, relatively high cover prices, and on-sale periods of about three months instead of the one month or less typical of real magazines.

The Zombies
Much of the retail space once dedicated to prominent weekly and monthly magazines has been given over instead to these magazine spinoffs. Also taking oxygen away from the sales of real magazines are SIPs published by such non-magazine brands as Pillsbury, the Mayo Clinic, USA Today -- and Life.

Three times Time Inc. has killed Life magazine, only to resurrect it for such bookazines as 100 Photographs That Changed the World and El Papa de Juan Pablo. No wonder they call it Life: This zombie just won’t stay dead!

Also enjoying living-dead status is U.S. News & World Report, which closed down its only print magazine late last year but in one bookstore had four different mooks – Best Colleges, Best Graduate Schools, Best Hospitals, and Amazing Animals. (Wait, shouldn’t that last one be Best Animals? Or maybe Best Veterinary Hospitals? How about Best Obedience Schools?)

The "Best" books all deviate from the usual bookazine model by running ads -- lots of ads in the case of Best Hospitals, way more than the real magazine used to have. My contact at U.S. News says the new 344-page Best Colleges book is the company’s largest “issue” in at least two decades, and maybe ever. It sounds as if the magazine business is looking pretty good for U.S. News now that it’s out of the magazine business.

One-shots used to be the province of enthusiast magazines testing out ideas for a new title: Sportscar Convertible is doing well, so let’s try a SIP called Corvette Convertible. If the response is good enough, we’ll solicit subscriptions and start publishing bimonthly.

But that door is closed. The beleaguered newsstand distribution system no longer has the patience to give untested niche titles a shot.

Favorable Economics
Bookazines from well-respected brands are another matter, and the big publishers are happy to play along even if that diverts attention from their periodical issues. Consider the economics, as exemplified by Better Homes & Gardens: The 232-page October issue is priced at $3.99, but its 144-page SIP siblings – I saw three in one store – sell for $9.99 each.

Here’s my analysis: As consumers have gained greater ability to find exactly the information they want or need, the traditional mass-market magazine with its mishmash of loosely related articles is looking increasingly irrelevant to them. (The October issue of National Geographic has articles on the teen brain, surviving cancer, whale sharks, and Ansel Adams. Who's the target audience?)

But in an age of link-baiting and belly-fat ads, consumers still trust respected magazine brands. When those brands offer content -- whether a mook or an app -- that’s laser-targeted to their needs or interests, suddenly the wallets come out. (A National Geo mook called Wildlife: The Greatest Photographs? Let me see that.)

I was one of those who snickered last year when the Magazine Publishers of America changed its name to The Association of Magazine Media. Now the name is actually starting to make sense.

Just don’t ask me to define “magazine media.”

If you actually made it to the end of this article, you might enjoy suffering through these other Dead Tree Edition analyses of the U.S. magazine industry:

• Is Apple's 30-Percent Solution Really So Bad?
• Stuck at the Borders: Magazine Publishers Have Failed to Explore the Amazon 
• App-oplexy: Magazines on the iPad
• The Yellowing of National Geographic: Will Today's Copies Age Faster Than That Stack in Your Gramma's Attic?
• Viagra to the Rescue? Postal Regulations Are Taking the Life Out of Tabloid Magazines