6 ms·

This press release has a bit more explanation: https://www.farmersalmanac.com/end-of-an-era-farmers-almanac-announces-final-publication https://www.farmersalma

by thorum 11mo ago

This press release has a bit more explanation: https://www.farmersalmanac.com/end-of-an-era-farmers-almanac-announces-final-publication https://www.farmersalmanac.com/end-of-an-era-farmers-almanac... > This decision, though difficult, reflects the growing financial challenges of producing and distributing the Almanac in today’s chaotic media environment.

cowsandmilk 11mo ago
Hardly an explanation, what is meant by chaotic media environment?
- khannn 11mo ago
  If I had to hazard a guess I'd say how everyone has the internet in their pocket, news and entertainment being one and the same, and the fact that nobody reads books anymore
  - atomicnature 11mo ago
    Book sales in general (across all formats) are up I think - so there are still many, many readers around. We just have many new formats (EPUB, audiobooks, reader devices, etc.) and of course population is increasing over the globe. I'm pretty sure we have the highest number of readers on the planet right now than ever before in absolute terms.
    - jbstack 11mo ago
      I'm not sure that's still correct. There was an uplift because of Covid and people having more spare time, but whatever more recent (2024 - 2025) sources I can find suggest the trend has reversed. It's worth also considering demographics. If you narrow the focus to just younger generations (who, we can guess, are more addicted to smartphones) then the numbers look pretty bad. E.g.: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/nov/05/report-fall-in-children-reading-for-pleasure-national-literacy-trust https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/nov/05/report-fall-in...
      - technothrasher 11mo ago
        My son, who is away at college as a freshman this year, recently phoned me and apologized for calling me a bad dad and thanked me for not allowing him to have any devices in his bedroom after bedtime growing up, as it made him become a reader. He said he was amazed when he got to school and nobody else reads for pleasure.
        khannn 11mo ago
        It's honestly amazing when I'm around gen z people and how addicted to phones they are.
      - atomicnature 11mo ago
        1. The survey seems limited to UK or so. Not sure - it doesn't look like a global report. 2. Don't confuse "enjoyment" with "number of readers". The previous generation may have enjoyed it more - because there were no better options. 3. People over the globe are more educated now, and engaged in knowledge work. They must read to get work done. 4. Don't forget the "pirate book" scene - such as lib gen, Anna's archive, etc. - in developing countries.
    - hajile 11mo ago
      Audience matters here. Most book sales have been falling. The one increase has been in romance porn with those books accounting for some 50% of all paperbacks sold at this point (they are dominating for the exact same reason porn dominates internet video content). Personally, I don't count pornhub traffic the same way I count Youtube or Netflix traffic and I think the same applies here.
    - autoexec 11mo ago
      I can't fault people for feeling that nobody reads anymore. In the US today the majority of Americans can't even understand books written at a 6th grade level and literacy has been trending downward. Only a small number of us are propping up book sales.
- vslira 11mo ago
  Without snark, I believe it just means they’re not making money, likely because people consume less “published media” nowadays
- iAMkenough 11mo ago
  You can Google or ask AI instead of reference a book
  - arthurfirst 11mo ago
    Like asking for a book at the library in Rollerball?
- Spooky23 11mo ago
  Their audience is old people who buy the book at the cashier line at Walmart. Both their customer base and sales outlet is dying off. These things are really magazines that run once a year. The notion of a magazine is a weird concept that doesn’t compute for anyone younger than 35.
  - bluGill 11mo ago
    With all the digital AI slop these days I'm starting to look for magazines again. Ones that put some effort into verification that the stories really are true.
    - KPGv2 11mo ago
      I think there's been a micro-boom in prestige periodicals. Until I kind of fell back out of love with tennis, I was a subscriber of Racquet, which is a really high quality print publication about tennis (and occasionally other racquet sports). https://shop.racquetmag.com/products/issue-no-8?pr_prod_strat=jac&pr_rec_id=b4e20e018&pr_rec_pid=7830046834900&pr_ref_pid=7957991948500&pr_seq=uniform https://shop.racquetmag.com/products/issue-no-8?pr_prod_stra... if you're interested in seeing what a very nice tennis magazine looks like (links to shop because it's the best way to show contents)
    - 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 11mo ago
      The last couple times I cracked open a magazine it was 50% ads and I'm not sure how many articles were PR releases. Thinking of Pop Sci, Psychology Today, etc
      - bluGill 11mo ago
        Only 50% - that seems low. They were always more than that (except mad, though they did take ads latter I'm told).
  - reaperducer 11mo ago
    These things are really magazines that run once a year. The notion of a magazine is a weird concept that doesn’t compute for anyone younger than 35. Ageism aside, your stereotype of young people today is about a decade out of date. It doesn't sound like you've been to a book store in America since 2015. I see high schoolers gathered around the magazine racks at the book store every time I visit, which is at least weekly. In a lot of ways, nothing has changed. Blue jeans, concert shirts, and someone always walks away with a Rolling Stone.
- muzani 11mo ago
  I think they simply don't know what to do next. In the past century, you could write a book with good content, put it on a shelf, and people would pay money for it. Then at some point, book stores stopped existing. Some turned into gift stores where the book was some decoration you'd put on the shelf to add aesthetic to the room. So a lot of things went digital. But nobody wants to pay for digital information. You'd think almanacs would be popular in the era of overinformation. What channel next? YT shorts? TikTok? Do farmers even use LinkedIn? How do you deal with bots that grab all the information you put out there and repackage it into a $20/month subscription?
  - profunctor 11mo ago
    Book stores did not stop existing. They are everywhere. Book sales are up in recent times.
    - threetonesun 11mo ago
      Print book sales are down, although not as much as people want to believe. Book stores are making a comeback but in terms of number of books on shelves I'd say the average one is ~50% less. We had a real heyday in the late 90s where a Barnes and Nobles would have a copy of almost any book you could reasonably be looking for, plus multiple rows of magazines. We have not returned to that, and certainly books that you'd pick up on a whim like an end-cap item have reasonably suffered for it, or increased their prices to fairly insane levels.
      - rufus_foreman 11mo ago
        >> We had a real heyday in the late 90s where a Barnes and Nobles would have a copy of almost any book you could reasonably be looking for, plus multiple rows of magazines. I don't know if there was ever a bookstore that ever had a copy of almost any book you could reasonably be looking for. Maybe Powell's back in the day if you counted the technical bookstore along with the mother ship. Certainly not Barnes & Noble. There are still multiple rows of magazines at B&N today, including ones on Linux, programming, network admin, Raspberry Pi, etc. The one I go to is the same size as the ones I went to 20 years ago and an order of magnitude larger than the mall bookstores I went to 40 years ago. Although some of that space is taken up by the coffee shop, Legos, and vinyl records.
- tonetheman 11mo ago
  [dead]
- fsckboy 11mo ago
  >what is meant by chaotic media environment? it means that the almanac does not bring in enough profit to make it worthwhile to continue or to find a buyer for the company, and the owners are also aware that many of the same profit related issues are in the public discourse as affecting (formerly-)print media in the now-digital market, so the owners conclude that their financial are part of the general trend in the industry rather than to specific problems with the business formula they have used for over 200 years.

by thorum 11mo ago

cowsandmilk 11mo ago

Hardly an explanation, what is meant by chaotic media environment?

khannn 11mo ago
If I had to hazard a guess I'd say how everyone has the internet in their pocket, news and entertainment being one and the same, and the fact that nobody reads books anymore
- atomicnature 11mo ago
  Book sales in general (across all formats) are up I think - so there are still many, many readers around. We just have many new formats (EPUB, audiobooks, reader devices, etc.) and of course population is increasing over the globe. I'm pretty sure we have the highest number of readers on the planet right now than ever before in absolute terms.
  - jbstack 11mo ago
    I'm not sure that's still correct. There was an uplift because of Covid and people having more spare time, but whatever more recent (2024 - 2025) sources I can find suggest the trend has reversed. It's worth also considering demographics. If you narrow the focus to just younger generations (who, we can guess, are more addicted to smartphones) then the numbers look pretty bad. E.g.: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/nov/05/report-fall-in-children-reading-for-pleasure-national-literacy-trust https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/nov/05/report-fall-in...
    - technothrasher 11mo ago
      My son, who is away at college as a freshman this year, recently phoned me and apologized for calling me a bad dad and thanked me for not allowing him to have any devices in his bedroom after bedtime growing up, as it made him become a reader. He said he was amazed when he got to school and nobody else reads for pleasure.
      - khannn 11mo ago
        It's honestly amazing when I'm around gen z people and how addicted to phones they are.
    - atomicnature 11mo ago
      1. The survey seems limited to UK or so. Not sure - it doesn't look like a global report. 2. Don't confuse "enjoyment" with "number of readers". The previous generation may have enjoyed it more - because there were no better options. 3. People over the globe are more educated now, and engaged in knowledge work. They must read to get work done. 4. Don't forget the "pirate book" scene - such as lib gen, Anna's archive, etc. - in developing countries.
  - hajile 11mo ago
    Audience matters here. Most book sales have been falling. The one increase has been in romance porn with those books accounting for some 50% of all paperbacks sold at this point (they are dominating for the exact same reason porn dominates internet video content). Personally, I don't count pornhub traffic the same way I count Youtube or Netflix traffic and I think the same applies here.
  - autoexec 11mo ago
    I can't fault people for feeling that nobody reads anymore. In the US today the majority of Americans can't even understand books written at a 6th grade level and literacy has been trending downward. Only a small number of us are propping up book sales.
vslira 11mo ago
Without snark, I believe it just means they’re not making money, likely because people consume less “published media” nowadays
iAMkenough 11mo ago
You can Google or ask AI instead of reference a book
- arthurfirst 11mo ago
  Like asking for a book at the library in Rollerball?
Spooky23 11mo ago
Their audience is old people who buy the book at the cashier line at Walmart. Both their customer base and sales outlet is dying off. These things are really magazines that run once a year. The notion of a magazine is a weird concept that doesn’t compute for anyone younger than 35.
- bluGill 11mo ago
  With all the digital AI slop these days I'm starting to look for magazines again. Ones that put some effort into verification that the stories really are true.
  - KPGv2 11mo ago
    I think there's been a micro-boom in prestige periodicals. Until I kind of fell back out of love with tennis, I was a subscriber of Racquet, which is a really high quality print publication about tennis (and occasionally other racquet sports). https://shop.racquetmag.com/products/issue-no-8?pr_prod_strat=jac&pr_rec_id=b4e20e018&pr_rec_pid=7830046834900&pr_ref_pid=7957991948500&pr_seq=uniform https://shop.racquetmag.com/products/issue-no-8?pr_prod_stra... if you're interested in seeing what a very nice tennis magazine looks like (links to shop because it's the best way to show contents)
  - 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 11mo ago
    The last couple times I cracked open a magazine it was 50% ads and I'm not sure how many articles were PR releases. Thinking of Pop Sci, Psychology Today, etc
    - bluGill 11mo ago
      Only 50% - that seems low. They were always more than that (except mad, though they did take ads latter I'm told).
- reaperducer 11mo ago
  These things are really magazines that run once a year. The notion of a magazine is a weird concept that doesn’t compute for anyone younger than 35. Ageism aside, your stereotype of young people today is about a decade out of date. It doesn't sound like you've been to a book store in America since 2015. I see high schoolers gathered around the magazine racks at the book store every time I visit, which is at least weekly. In a lot of ways, nothing has changed. Blue jeans, concert shirts, and someone always walks away with a Rolling Stone.
muzani 11mo ago
I think they simply don't know what to do next. In the past century, you could write a book with good content, put it on a shelf, and people would pay money for it. Then at some point, book stores stopped existing. Some turned into gift stores where the book was some decoration you'd put on the shelf to add aesthetic to the room. So a lot of things went digital. But nobody wants to pay for digital information. You'd think almanacs would be popular in the era of overinformation. What channel next? YT shorts? TikTok? Do farmers even use LinkedIn? How do you deal with bots that grab all the information you put out there and repackage it into a $20/month subscription?
- profunctor 11mo ago
  Book stores did not stop existing. They are everywhere. Book sales are up in recent times.
  - threetonesun 11mo ago
    Print book sales are down, although not as much as people want to believe. Book stores are making a comeback but in terms of number of books on shelves I'd say the average one is ~50% less. We had a real heyday in the late 90s where a Barnes and Nobles would have a copy of almost any book you could reasonably be looking for, plus multiple rows of magazines. We have not returned to that, and certainly books that you'd pick up on a whim like an end-cap item have reasonably suffered for it, or increased their prices to fairly insane levels.
    - rufus_foreman 11mo ago
      >> We had a real heyday in the late 90s where a Barnes and Nobles would have a copy of almost any book you could reasonably be looking for, plus multiple rows of magazines. I don't know if there was ever a bookstore that ever had a copy of almost any book you could reasonably be looking for. Maybe Powell's back in the day if you counted the technical bookstore along with the mother ship. Certainly not Barnes & Noble. There are still multiple rows of magazines at B&N today, including ones on Linux, programming, network admin, Raspberry Pi, etc. The one I go to is the same size as the ones I went to 20 years ago and an order of magnitude larger than the mall bookstores I went to 40 years ago. Although some of that space is taken up by the coffee shop, Legos, and vinyl records.
tonetheman 11mo ago
[dead]
fsckboy 11mo ago
>what is meant by chaotic media environment? it means that the almanac does not bring in enough profit to make it worthwhile to continue or to find a buyer for the company, and the owners are also aware that many of the same profit related issues are in the public discourse as affecting (formerly-)print media in the now-digital market, so the owners conclude that their financial are part of the general trend in the industry rather than to specific problems with the business formula they have used for over 200 years.