International Editions
Although Reader's Digest was founded in the U.S., its international editions have made it the best-selling monthly magazine in the world. The magazine's worldwide circulation including all editions has reached 17 million copies and 70 million readers.
Reader's Digest is currently published in 49 editions and 21 languages and is available in over 70 countries, including Slovenia, Croatia, and Romania in 2008.
Its international editions account for about 50% of the magazine's trade volume. In each market, local editors commission or purchase articles for their own market and share content with US and other editions. The selected articles are then translated by local translators and the translations edited by the local editors to make them match the "well-educated informal" style of the American edition.
Over the 90 years, the company has published editions in various languages in different countries, or for different regions.
Usually these editions started out as translations of the US version of the magazine, but over time many non-US editions became unique, providing local material more germane to local readers. Local editions that still publish the bulk of the American Reader's Digest are usually titled with a qualifier, such as the Portuguese edition, Seleções do Reader's Digest (Selections from Reader's Digest), or the Swedish edition, Reader's Digest Det Bästa (The Best of Reader's Digest).
The list is sorted by year of first publication. Some countries had editions but no longer do; for example, the Danish version of Reader's Digest (Det Bedste) ceased publication in 2005 and was replaced by the Swedish version (Reader's Digest Det Bästa); as a result the Swedish edition covers stories about both countries (but written solely in Swedish). The Japanese edition ran from September 1946 until present.
- 1938 - United Kingdom (sold in 2010, operated under licence)
- 1940 - Latin America (in Spanish) (as Selecciones)
- 1942 - Brazil
- 1943 - Sweden
- 1943 - Egypt (Arabic) (Al-Mukhtar)
- 1945 - Finland
- 1946 - Australia, Denmark, Japan
- 1947 - Belgium (French), France, Norway
- 1948 - Canada (in English and French), Germany, Italy, South Africa, Switzerland (in French and German)
- 1950 - Argentina, New Zealand
- 1952 - Austria, Spain
- 1954 - India and Pakistan (in English)
- 1957 - Netherlands
- 1965 - Republic of China, Hong Kong and Southeast Asia (in Traditional Chinese)
- 1968 - Belgium (Dutch)
- 1971 - Spanish speakers in the United States (in Spanish), Portugal
- 1978 - South Korea
- 1991 - Hungary, Russia
- 1993 - Czech Republic
- 1995 - Poland
- 1996 - Thailand
- 1997 - Slovakia
- 2004 - Indonesia
- 2005 - Romania, Slovenia, Croatia, Bulgaria
- 2007 - Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Ukraine
- 2008 - People's Republic of China operations discontinued in 2012
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Famous quotes containing the word editions:
“The next Augustan age will dawn on the other side of the Atlantic. There will, perhaps, be a Thucydides at Boston, a Xenophon at New York, and, in time, a Virgil at Mexico, and a Newton at Peru. At last, some curious traveller from Lima will visit England and give a description of the ruins of St. Paul’s, like the editions of Balbec and Palmyra.”
—Horace Walpole (1717–1797)