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.
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...
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.
Personally, I don't count pornhub traffic the same way I count Youtube or Netflix traffic and I think the same applies here.
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.
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)
Ageism aside, your stereotype of young people today is about a decade out of date.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.
That's the Old Farmer's Almanac. I don't know where this Farmer's Almanac is on the shelves, but it's certainly not at Walmart, which carries a different publication that's even older.
Confusing names, yes, because one is TFA and the other is TOFA.
That's all transitioning to delivery and self-checkout. 20 years ago, you'd like 30 lanes open with eyeballs on the book. Now, in my area there's like 3-5 lanes most times.
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?
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.
And B&N itself is doing just fine, and is opening new locations. Borders is the only major chain that failed to adapt. Other large book retailers are also still going strong, e.g. Books-A-Million.
[1] https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/12/do-not-turn-t...
Farmers don't even use the Almanac, because it's not accurate. These things are all 50/50. A coin toss in their predictions.
In statistics, two things are simple: predicting the very next step, and predicting what happens in 100,000 steps. It's the part in between that's tough. Weather is a function of statistics, essentially. It's why we can tell what the weather will be like tomorrow, and why we can tell that La Nina is going to affect us this year, but why we can't tell what the weather will be like on a Thursday 4 weeks from now.
The same people who buy books about healing crystals, who donate to televangelists, who go to reiki "healers" and chiropractors, who believe in tarot firmly, etc.
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.