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- <text id=89TT1126>
- <title>
- May 01, 1989: Business Notes:Publishing
- </title>
- <history>
- TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1989
- May 01, 1989 Abortion
- </history>
- <article>
- <source>Time Magazine</source>
- <hdr>
- BUSINESS, Page 59
- Business Notes
- PUBLISHING
- This Chapter Paid for by . . .
- </hdr><body>
- <p> That is a good book which is opened with expectation and
- closed with profit," wrote American educator Bronson Alcott.
- Whittle Communications couldn't agree more. The Knoxville-based
- company plans to publish a series of books that will contain a
- radically new profit-making device: advertising. While
- paperbacks have sometimes been sprinkled with ads, such come-ons
- have almost never appeared between hard covers.
- </p>
- <p> The books, constituting a series called The Larger Agenda,
- will be business-oriented analyses of 100 or so pages, written
- by such authors as David Halberstam, John Kenneth Galbraith and
- George Gilder for fees of about $60,000. Each book will be
- initially distributed free to some 150,000 opinion leaders,
- including executives and politicians, and later sold in
- bookstores. The advertising income will finance the giveaways
- and help keep the retail price of the books relatively low,
- while still ensuring a healthy profit margin for Whittle, which
- is 50% owned by the Time Inc. Magazine Co., the publisher of
- TIME.
- </p>
- <p> Will Whittle start a trend? Not everywhere. Declares Roger
- Straus, chief executive of the Farrar, Straus & Giroux
- publishing house: "We would certainly not condone the use of
- advertising in our books." Thus the prospect of Joe Isuzu
- popping up in Pride and Prejudice is not quite at hand.
- </p>
-
- </body></article>
- </text>
-
-