Comments on: Dear America,

By: lux

lux — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 02:39:13 +0000

This is a great post. I think that people, in general, most people don’t understand what goes into any particular business and expect everything to be free.

By: sid

sid — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 23:47:07 +0000

Which reminds me that I should get Cuisine at Home, too. And Cooks Illustrated.

By: M-shel

M-shel — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 17:24:18 +0000

Shaz–I love Cuisine at Home (Sid intro’d me to it last year)…I’m getting the subscription this year, but when it ends I’ll probably just go with buying the bound version at the end of each year.

And I never thought about the cooking ones doing so because they’re kept and referred to, as opposed to other magazines that one tends to read once and then never really look at again.

By: Shaz

Shaz — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 03:04:28 +0000

The only mag sub I get now is Cuisine at Home (which I LOVE) for $21 or $24 a year for 6 or so issues. I’d rather go with that than pay less and deal with advertising.

M-shel: I would guess they go with the year-end book as an option for people who don’t want mags lying around. However there are those that look forward to getting a new issue every other month or so. Same with comic book anthologies. Some people like going to their local comic book store every week to pick up the new issue, some people just wait for the anthology. Also I believe you’re more likely to see this with cooking mags because folks are more likely to keep and refer to them for recipes, techniques, etc. Add to all of that, Cuisine at Home even has an index and binders you can buy (all issues of Cuisine at Home come three-hole punched) which tells me they know their readers refer to their stuff regularly.

By: M-shel

M-shel — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 15:21:04 +0000

This is where being discerning about your magazine subscriptions come in. I used to get Self, Fitness, Shape, etc. but every time I read them I was annoyed to no end by the products they hawked.

I realized that those products were typically in line with the quality of the articles.

Now, when I read magazines like Bitch or Real Simple or various cooking magazines, I see the ads as something I could feasibly use/want, thus it’s far, far less annoying to see those ads.

The one thing that does baffle me is when magazines (and cooking magazines are the big one in this—Taste of Home, Cooks Country, Cooks Illustrated, Cuisine at Home) do an end of year book that is a compilation of all the magazines. Chances are I’m going to wait for that book instead of having 9-12 magazines lying around. I’d think this would be a way to deplete ad income, thus deplete magazine quality.