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TIME: Almanac 1990
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1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso
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time
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050189
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05018900.011
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1990-09-17
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BUSINESS, Page 59Business NotesPUBLISHINGThis Chapter Paid for by . . .
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.
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.
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.