The Bangkok Bugle will be undergoing a re-design and, hence, will not be available for several hours on the morning of Sunday, July 12th. Apologies for any inconvenience.
An increasing number of bookshops in Thailand are stocking English language magazines.
With 54 stores nationwide Asia Books is the largest chain. Around two thirds of their stores are in Bangkok. The company purchased the Bookazine chain around a year ago, and while a small number of Bookazine outlets remain in Bangkok most have been re-branded as Asia Books outlets. B2S, which is part of the Central group, is number two in terms of outlets. These stores carry a good range of English and Thai magazines and can be found in all Central department stores.
Kinokuniya has three large stores in Bangkok that stock a good range of English, Thai, Japanese and Chinese magazines. For me, the Kinokuniya stores at Siam Paragon ranks as the best in Bangkok in terms of the sheer number and range of titles available.
The number one Thai language bookshop chain is Se-Ed, and in the past year they have started stocking a limited range of popular English magazines. Nai-In, which operates the stores at Suvarnabhumi Airport, also carries a small number of English publications.
The expat-focused Villa Supermarket chain also stocks a decent range of English magazines, and a range of popular titles can also be found at the checkouts at the Emporium and Siam Paragon supermarkets.
Bangkok has one discounted bookshop, The Book Lounge, which is operated by Asia Books and is located at Amarin Plaze. This shop stocks a reasonable range of English magazines. Regular readers of The Bangkok Bugle will know that a sizable number of English magazines also appear on sale at Chatuchak Weekend Market at substantially discounted prices.
Almost all of the imported English magazines are handled by Asia Books owned Distri Thai, so the range of titles does not vary much from store to store and chain to chain.
Thailand continues to buck the global print media downturn as yet more magazines appear on the country's shelves each month.
The latest is The Prototype Electronics Magazine published by Innovative Experiment Co. Limited. Priced at 75 baht and running to 84 pages, this title can certainly be described as specialist and niche. As you would expect from a new magazine the advertising content is low at less than 10 per cent.
There are no official figures for the number of new magazines versus those that cease publishing, however it does seem the overall number of titles is increasing month by month.
Michael Jackson tribute magazines have started to appear on the shelves in Thailand.
Besides the weekly news magazines Nation Weekend and Matichon Weekly which appeared last weekend with Jackson front pages but limited content inside, the first special editions of regular Thai magazines have started to appear.
Leading the way is Michael Jackson Memories from Music Express magazine, published by Inspire Entertainment Co. Limited. Hot on its heels is In Memory of King of Pop from Who? Magazine, published by Solid Media (Thailand) Co. Limited. These editions are priced at 60 baht (£1.05, US$ 1.75) and 65 baht respectively. Both magazines are locally produced and are not related to similar named magazines overseas.
When I was in Singapore last weekend I counted at least a dozen local and imported magazines featuring the death of the pop icon. Only a few of those imported titles have made it into Thailand so far.
The Bangkok Post reports today that the Special Branch Police Division of the Royal Thai Police has denied banning sales of this week's edition of The Economist.
The story quotes Pol. Lt. Gen. Teeradej Rodphothong as saying his agency was not authorised to prohibit sellers from ordering the magazine for sale in Thailand, and it had still not examined whether the content offends the monarchy. But if anyone complains to the Police about the issue and the article breaks the lese majeste law, the officers would act against the sellers.
So it would appear even more certain that Thai distributors took the decision themselves, as it would be the sellers who could face action and not the publisher.
The Southeast Asian Press Alliance is reporting about the non appearance of this week's edition of The Economist magazine in Thailand.
Subscriber copies, and those destined for the news trade, have not appeared. This is the fourth time this year this has happened. Interestingly the article which appears to have led to the decision by Thai distributors not to handle this edition is still available online and had not been blocked.
Normally copies of each week's edition arrive in Thailand around lunchtime each Friday. Subscribers were only notified of the problem at 4pm on Friday afternoon, which leads me to suspect copies did actually make it into the Kingdom before someone took the decision not to distribute this edition. Previously subscribers were notified shortly after the magazine went to press at 10pm on a Thursday evening.
Liverpool Football Club's match against the Thailand national team in Bangkok on July 22 looks set to be a sell out. As of today tickets in some parts of the ground have already sold out. Tickets are only available as follows:
- A small number of North Zone (600 baht) tickets are available directly from Profitable Group's offices in Bangkok.
- A number of West Zone Maroon (1,750 baht) and West Zone Orange (2,500 baht) tickets are available from Adidas shops and from the Profitable Group offices.
Tickets in the VVIP, South Zone, West Zone Yellow (VIP) and East Zone Kop have already sold out. Tickets for Liverpool's match in Singapore on July 26 are in equally short supply.For details visit the Profitable Group website.
Last week I reported that copies of Thailand's newspapers featuring the death of Michael Jackson were being sold on eBay.
In the past few days some have sold. Copies of The Nation (US$9.99), The Bangkok Post (US$9.99) and Kom Chad Luek (US$4.99) have attracted single bids whereas others have remained unsold.
The frenzy for Michael Jackson newspapers and magazines is global. Mark Fletcher, author of the Australian Newsagency blog and a newsagent himself, said last week: "We could have sold four times our Time and Rolling Stone allocation. Hopefully, publishers will reprint as I suspect the appetite for Michael Jackson retrospectives is a way off being satisfied."
The current edition of The Economist is the fourth edition of the magazine that has not appeared in Thailand during 2009.
Two editions at the end of January failed to make it to the Kingdom, and in April an article about the monarchy led to a decision by the publishers not to distribute.
What's different about this week's case is the clear identification (in an email to subscribers) that the company which looks after deliveries to subscribers took the decision not to handle this edition.
Although no official figures are available I understand The Economist has in the region of 1,800 subscribers in Thailand. Each has had their subscription increased by one copy to take account of the "missing" edition.
The first magazines featuring Michael Jackson started to appear on the shelves in Bangkok on Thursday. Leading the way were the Asia Pacific editions of Time and Newsweek. At that time none of the locally produced magazines had appeared.
As I mentioned earlier, the distribution and printing processes in Thailand largely prevent a quick response to global events such as this. Even those publishers with their own printing presses or distribution networks are looking at four or five days as an absolute minimum.
I am now in Singapore and both Borders and Kinokuniya have copies of the Australian and United Kingdom editions of magazines produced earlier this week featuring Michael Jackson.
The Economist magazine will not be distributed in Thailand this week。
In an email to its subscribers earlier today, The Economist said: "We deeply regret to inform you that our distributors in Thailand have decided not to deliver the July 4th issues of The Economist in light of our coverage relating to the lese majeste law."
For the last three months subscriber copies in Thailand have been delivered by a company called Angler's Liberation Co. Limited. It is not clear from the email whether copies will appear in the bookshops, but I suspect not.
The story in question is headlined 'Treason in Cyberspace' and, given the current provisions of the lese majeste laws, it is clear why this edition of the magazine will not be seen by subscribers in Thailand.
The Nation is reporting that the entire board of the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Thailand (FCCT) has been accused of lese majeste by selling DVDs of a controversial speech that took place in 2007.
According to the report which quotes from a story on the ASTV Manager website, 57-year-old translator Laksana Kornsilpa filed the complaint earlier this week alleging "the whole board may be acting in an organised fashion and the goal may be to undermine the credibility of Thailand's highest institution". The story also quotes Laksana as saying some major local newspapers may be part of a movement to undermine the monarchy.
A total of 13 people make up the current board of the FCCT, including staff from the BBC, Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, Channel News Asia and The Nation.
If imitation is truly the sincerest form of flattery then I owe a debt of gratitude to The Nation.
The concept for the front cover design of their 'Crisis' special supplement, published to mark their 38th anniversary (right), looks remarkably similar to the design (left) we have been using for the last three months to promote our Thailand Business Essentials range of pocket books.
Of course the wording is different but the concept isn't.
And now for a gratuitous plug. Copies of the Thailand Business Essentials:Banking book, written and edited by yours truly, are available at all good bookshops and from Amazon.com. Thailand Business Essentials:Property is set to be published within the next two weeks.
The Nation, which was launched this day in 1971, celebrates its 38th birthday today. Many congratulations.
My coverage of Thai Rath's publication of the David Carradine photographs drew a large number of visitors last month. The number of unique visitors to The Bangkok Bugle was up 143 per cent on the previous month, and up a staggering 441 per cent on the same month in 2008.
Only two non-Carradine stories made it into the top ten; Liverpool Football Club's impending visit to Bangkok (7th) and the launch of the Thai Red News newspaper (10th).
This website is my hobby and I am always amazed by the number of people the visit and interact, either by leaving a comment or by email. I want to once again record my sincere thanks to everyone that has visited, and also to everyone that has linked to one of my stories.
If you're a blogger I'm certain you will have an opinion about news aggregator websites. These are websites that use your headlines or content and, in most cases, provide a link back to your site in return.
Thailand Today is one such site that provides "All Thailand News In One Place". It features headline news from sources such as The Bangkok Post and The Nation, as well as news from a select number of Thailand-based blogs including Bangkok Pundit, My Thai Friend, Phuket Vogue and The Bangkok Bugle.
Amanta Sriwastigul, a spokesperson for Thailand Today which launched in April 2009 tells The Bangkok Bugle: "Our aim is to put together many Thailand related news services to give Thailand fans and professionals a quick overview of what is happening in Thailand. I do believe that we provide added value to our site visitors because it is impossible for most people to search the web for hours and days to find the news they are interested in."
So what about those, and I admit to being one, who aren't totally comfortable with a third-party website openly seeking to make money from external content. Amanta says: "I can understand what you mean by saying that we use your blogs (and other news sources) as our content. But I think this is not true. We just list the headline and the first few words for people to see whether they would like to read the whole article on your site. Even if news sources or blogs publish entire articles by RSS, would we only show the first few words on our side and never publish entire articles and not even substantial parts of articles. The content is on your side, we link to it and send you visitors."
Amanta also says the idea to include blogs as news sources came from a Thailand-based blogger, and adds: "We have never been contacted by a news or blog source asking us to remove the site from our service, but we do receive requests from editors who explicitly ask being incorporated."
Revenue for sites like Thailand Today comes exclusively from Google Adsense, but operating in an entirely different league are sites like Moreover. They charge companies a fee to monitor what's being said about them online.
Moreover was in the news yesterday over suggestions in may sue the UK's Newspaper Licensing Agency (NLA) over the latters attempt to change "web scraping" sites a fee for using the content from regional and local newspapers. The NLA's Commercial Director Andrew Hughes was quoted as saying: “This is not about having a go at bloggers: it’s about large, commercial operations which are scraping the entire content of tens of thousands of websites and creating paid-for services from them."
I know a number of Thailand-based blogs are monitored by companies such as Moreover, and where their clients are featured an alert is raised. In the days before the Internet, revenue for the publisher (in the case of newspapers at least) came from companies such as Moreover physically buying the printed product. Now they're able to access that same information for free but still charge the end-user for it.
So the question for bloggers is, how do you feel about sites that seek to make money from your work? Are you happy with just the publicity and visitors such links generate?
Magazines in Thailand seem to be launching at the rate that others are disappearing elsewhere in the world.
The latest addition to the shelves is Swanky, a glossy and, in some places, rather naughty magazine. It seems to be trying to be many things with a huge range of diverse topics including jokes, gadgets, chart watch, fashion, food and drink, astrology, travel and quite a lot of sex-related columns.
I really don't know who would buy this kind of magazine and, to me, I think the publishers are trying to appeal to a diverse audience without giving anything essential.
Swanky is priced at 90 baht and the June edition contains 170 pages. It is published by Samred Publishing.
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