Redemption or ridiculous? Rolling Stone, despite being sued the last time he wrote a bogus story for them, is giving the infamous plagarist Stephen Glass another chance to write for them. Are they that desparate for publicity over there? Has Bonnie Fuller’s departure from a sister publication at the company sent Jan Wenner completely over the edge?

No doubt, Glass’s stories will receive more editorial scrutiny (fact-checking on steriods) than any in the history of magazine publishing.

Amazin: The NY Times is reporting that Amazon.com is negotiating with major publishers to allow full-text searching of non-fiction books. In short, this would put every word of every non-fiction book online, and, while not allowing users to read the full text online, it would certainly help people find the books they are looking for. A side benefit would be the ease with which this would prevent plagarism. I’m volunteering to be a beta tester of this service as soon as it’s available. To me, this is why the world wide web (gee, I’ve never used that quaint-sounding term before on the rexblog) exists.

While I’m not in the practice of linking “related sites,” I would be remiss not to salute the efforts of pioneers in getting book texts online, including the University of Pennsylvania Library’s Online Book Page and Project Gutenberg.

Violin music: Media Life Magazine reports on a magazine subscription price comparison website (I think I blogged it when it launched, but it’s not showing up on my search) and says traditional circulation marketers don’t like it one little bit. This reminds me of the lawyer who defended a young man who murdered his parents by begging the jury to pity the defendant because he was an orphan. This is a bed those publishers have made for chickens to come home to roost in. (I feel sure there are some more metaphors I can mix in there.)

Randeed: Here’s how to launch a magazine called Randee that will be entirely obscure except for an article in the Chicago Sun Times and a link on rexblog. But the owners instincts are correct: you’ve got to generate buzz. I will say this, it’s more than a vaporzine.

Quote:

“We need that word-of-mouth campaign,” Schollmeyer says. “We need to be that cool, hip thing no one’s ever heard of.” His proposed, Lettermanesque advertising slogan: “Discover the magazine no one in America is talking about.”

(via romenesko)

Back list: The WSJ reports that Louis Border (of the famous book chain, Borders, and infamous dotcom fiasco, Webvan) is launching a service called Keep Media that will allow magazine publishers to sell archival articles to subscribers who pay $4.95 per month. He claims to have 140+ publications in the database. Sort of a poor-man’s Lexis-Nexis. Worth keeping an eye on for publishers (as a revenue source) and readers (as another resource). Worth following also to see if the “business model” works for him this time.

Atten-hut vaporzine watchers: The folks behind a new vaporzine, Drill (a “Maxim for military men”), have passed the first test. They generated a David Carr story. (Second test: a Samir quote?)

Now that I am Mr. Vaporzine, here is my prediction: At most, a prototype issue. Why does there need to be a Maxim Magazine for men who can already purchase Maxim. This does not compute. All it does is make people think David Carr will do a story on their vaporzine idea.

But wait, the article says that British custom publisher John Brown is behind the magazine. John Brown does great work in the UK and here, but the article doesn’t indicate wheter Drill will be a sponsored or customer magazine? I think this an important part of the story that David may have left out. If it is sponsored, then the official Mr. Vaporzine economist will recrunch the numbers and come out with a new prediction.

The magazine also has this comment about the editor, a comment that does not add to my confidence in its chances:

Lance Gould, a former feature writer for The Daily News in New York who is serving as the magazine’s editor in chief, has never served in the military, but did say that he “once donated to the Salvation Army.”