Cheap: According to the NY Post’s Keith Kelly (third item), All You, the Time Inc. magazine that will be marketed through Wal-Mart, will be priced at $1.47. “…at least one source said the price point means Time Inc. is selling the magazine below cost.” For comparison, the “lower-end magazines” Woman’s World sells for $1.49 and First for Women sells at $1.99.

Side note: Where did Keith dig up the “source” who said that $1.47 price was “below cost”? I have no desire to launch into a discussion of magazine economics, but I don’t think “selling below cost” is applicable to merely a component of a business model in which “selling” involves the selling of advertising pages as well as of individual units of the final printed product. I’m basing it completely on my gut, but I’d predict that an analysis of the magazine industry would find that a significant percentage of titles — perhaps the majority of them — “sell below cost.” Come to think of it, using the logic of “the source” of Kelly’s story, I would guess also that the Tennessee Titans sell me my season tickets “below cost,” as the team’s ticket revenues are unlikely to cover Steve McNair’s salary, much less the overhead of the entire organization.

College tuition news: A warning to a certain 13-year-old who may one day expect this weblog’s keeper (and his Dad) to help fund a college education: Don’t even think about it.

Way too much of a good thang: If you’re looking for a case to carry around your 40 iPods like designer Karl Lagerfeld owns (see “update” below), you can purchase one of these $1,500 Fendi bags. (picture via Wired.com).

Okay, let’s do the math:

At 10,000 tracks per iPod (surely these are 40 GB), that’s 400,000 songs (roughly 57 percent of the iTunes store inventory). Which equals (according to an extrapolation of Apple’s math on this page), 160 weeks (or 3 years and four weeks) of music playing 24/7. And if you were to purchase all that music from the iTunes store, it would cost you roughly $396,000. The $1,500 pricetag for the case seems like a steal. (I wonder if Fendi will be advertising in the magazine mentioned in the previous post.)

[Update: I guess I should have read the entire story before doing the math. The case apparently holds 12 iPods, but Lagerfield does report that he owns 40 (and one really ugly jogging suit). He uses them to store tracks from his collection of 60,000 CDs. You can do the math on what that cost him and how many hours of music they hold.]

ProJock Quarterly: On the vaporzine front, a magazine for professional athletes, OverTime Magazine, will launch in June, according to this press release. The release describes it as “a business and lifestyle magazine for professional athletes and sports industry insiders.” It will be published quarterly by the custom publishing company RMS Media Group for the Professional Business and Financial Network, an “internet-based professional membership association.” According to the release, the 25,000 circulation publication will be distributed exclusively to professional athletes - past and present -a nd to executives in the sports industry.

(Please feel free to add a comment on this post with your suggestions for headlines of stories you’d expect to see in this magazine.)

Cozy? I have an unwritten guideline (actually, I think it is written somewhere, but I can’t recall where) about this weblog that goes something like this: Don’t blog about the job-changes of or controversies surrounding magazine people (especially editors) or magazine transactions, especially when such news appears to be dancing on a grave. Why? Both topics bore me: One of the reasons I avoid marketing trade publications is the high percentage of such transactional noise that fill their pages.

Of course, I have been know to make very visible exceptions to that guidleline, most notably when the news involves magazine people associated with unethical or inappropriate practices or those who display over-inflated arrogance, like, for example Graydon Carter.

Custom publishing update: Nokia has announced the launch of N-Gage Insider, an industry trade magazine for retailers, distributors, and industry insiders. (N-Gage is a cell-phone based gaming platform.) A quarterly magazine, N-Gage Insider covers the latest in N-Gage news and information, including in-depth interviews with key Nokia executives and game producers, the latest title information and insight into the N-Gage retail strategy.