That’s one conclusion you can draw from a new survey showing that people who own Apple (AAPL) handsets are more willing to pay for stuff than the average Internet surfer.

It’s a U.K. survey, conducted by the Olswang media law firm, but my hunch is that you’d see similar results in the U.S. And given that consumers look much less likely to pay for stuff than publishers and distributors would like, it’s worth chewing on. Guardian:

The survey showed that 58% of people would pay to access online a film just released in cinemas, 52% would pay for access to a film that will not be on DVD for at least two months and 40% would pay to access a film which is already on DVD or pay-TV. Looking at solely iPhone users, however, those figures jump to 73%, 67% and 54% respectively….

News content, however, remains a tough online sell. The survey asked how willing consumers would be to buy a newspaper article or column which could be read on a computer or portable device such as a phone or e-reader. Only 19% of respondents expressed any willingness to pay–though that did increase to 30% among iPhone users.

I’ve repeatedly been skeptical that consumers will pay for something solely because it’s on a mobile device–this is the key idea behind the magazine industry’s digital plans–but I do think there are some cases where this might work.

My own anecdotal confirmation: My household just dropped $6 for three Pixar shorts for an iPhone 3G in a desperate attempt to provide some electronic babysitting/soothing. This, despite the fact that everything we bought is also available for free on YouTube. When you need the stuff, you can’t be dependent on a wireless connection.

Here’s one of the clips we spent $1.99 on:

Condé has a demo video it has been showing to advertisers, employees and plenty of other people, including me. The demo gives you a pretty good overview of what the publisher and Adobe (ADBE), which is building the software to produce and view the magazines, have in mind. But the publisher has turned down my request to show the clip to my readers.

This doesn’t mean you can’t see it, though. If you’re in New York City, you can troop down to the promotional “store” Wired magazine sponsors each year, located this time in the Meatpacking District (keep an eye peeled for the Betaworks guys). The publisher is showing off at least part of the clip there, and you can see some of it in this YouTube clip below (thanks to Brian Chen for spotting):

Obviously, it’s a much better experience if you can watch the video directly, instead of through someone else’s video camera. Also, I think you’d prefer to see it outside of the store, where you’re not subjected to slit-your-wrists techno music. So perhaps this will prompt the Condé folks to put the entire clip out in public.

In the meantime, here’s a gallery of “Saturday Night Live” cast members and other sort-of-famous people checking out last year’s store.

As many readers noted, one big problem–potentially–with the plan is that Adobe (ADBE) and Apple (AAPL) generally don’t play well together. And in the case of Apple’s iPhone, they don’t play at all: Adobe’s flash platform doesn’t work in the iPhone, which is why many video sites, which depend on flash, don’t work well on the gadget.

So what if this happens again with Apple’s tablet, if and when the thing finally arrives?

I noted this yesterday, but didn’t get to talk to Adobe and Condé about it until later. Now I have their responses. The short version: They sure hope it works out.

The longer version is that both Condé and Adobe plan on running on all sorts of devices. And there’s not a lot they can do to satisfy Apple’s (AAPL) tablet requirements in advance, since Apple won’t discuss the tablet or even acknowledge that the tablet is in the works.

Here’s Adobe’s official line, provided by Senior Experience Design Manager Jeremy Clark:

Adobe has taken initial steps to prepare Adobe AIR to support mobile with performance improvements (reductions in memory usage, runtime size, JavaScript CPU consumption, and reduced CPU usage for background applications), and support multi-touch input used by mobile phones and presumably a new generation of slate devices. In fact we just announced a beta for AIR 2.0 that incorporates many of these features.

Our job at Adobe is to help create a great digital publishing platform. If publishers like Conde Nast and NY Times are delivering brand-name content via Adobe AIR, we believe that the devices that will win in the marketplace, will be the ones that support this open format. It should also be noted that Adobe recently announced plans to enable Flash applications to be brought to iPhone and indeed several are available on the iTunes store.

So we’ll continue to look for ways to enable publishers to deliver their content to the widest possible range of platforms, even on platforms that don’t yet support our runtimes.

It’s a reasonable enough response, given the alternative, which is to wait around for Apple to bring forth the wondergadget–or not. And in the meantime, the companies would miss an opportunity to help set standards for other guys’ gadgets.

On the other hand, there’s the less politic response, which you’re not going to hear from either company on the record: “Boy oh boy, are we screwed if our stuff doesn’t work with the market leader.”

But here’s one version of that take, from Time Inc.’s Josh Quittner, who is working on producing tablet-ready magazines for the Time Warner (TWX) publishing unit:

I am a hyperbolic guy, not to mention a purple writer, but I think it’s conservative to say that in the miserable publishing business, there is no greater hope for salvation that the iThing. With visions of giant iPhones dancing in our heads, all of us are working on prototypes of magazines and newspapers that will work on 9.7-inch, multi-touch screens linked wirelessly to stores. And, while there are at least a dozen manufacturers heatedly working on their own iterations, we all await the iThing because history has shown us that Steve Jobs leads the parade. Chaos will ensue, with many idiotic and competing platforms drawing precious resources from content makers who have to try just about everything until a frontrunner emerges.

Oh. One more quick item: As Quittner says, there are lots of publishers working on this stuff, and I look forward to seeing all of their efforts. And in case anyone gets the idea that I’m only paying attention to the biggest dogs, here’s what FastCompany.com’s Noah Robischon has to say about his company’s digital plans:

We’re working on delivering the magazine in several different digital formats right now, including to e-readers. Assuming the iTablet is a real product, and it uses any of these formats–and I’ve got no inside knowledge, it’s all based on rumor and guesswork–then we’ll be on the device too.

We’ve been approached by a few different companies working on e-reader formats for magazine publishers, as well as a couple that want to create digital versions of the magazine pages for online display. So we’re evaluating our options now. This space has become very active in the last 6 months, and it’s great to have so many options.

So there you go. Next?

[Image credit: clarity]

But Condé, like other publishers, says Apple (AAPL) won’t actually talk to the company about its plans for the device, or even acknowledge that it has plans.*

Condé’s plan, meanwhile, is to create digital versions of its magazines that will work on all the upcoming tablets, using new software from Adobe (ADBE). Those tablets aren’t actually on the market yet, but the publisher says it’s confident that we’ll soon see multiple versions of machines featuring large color touchscreens and wireless connections.

So who’s going to make those gadgets? Condé Nast CEO Chuck Townsend says his company is working closely with Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) and that it has also been communicating its plans to Apple. But Townsend made a point of saying that Apple executives themselves refuse to acknowledge that they’re actually planning a tablet: “They’re not talking to anybody openly,” he says.

Adobe is creating a publishing tool for the new format, as well as magazine-reader software that may come pre-installed on the devices or may require a download. The software company says it is working exclusively with Condé now, but will offer its tools to other publishers next year.

[Important technical point several readers have brought up: Adobe says its new reader software will run using its AIR platform, which works on multiple operating systems, including Apple's desktop system. But neither AIR nor Adobe's flash software works on Apple's iPhone, so if the new mystery device runs on that operating system, there's a problem. I'm following up with Adobe to see what it has to say. UPDATE: Here's Adobe's response.]

Condé says its work with Adobe won’t preclude the company from joining the “Hulu for magazines” storefront/distribution joint venture it has been discussing with Time Warner’s (TWX) Time Inc. and other publishers. “Those discussions are ongoing and important and imminent,” Townsend says.

Okay. So what will Condé’s magazines look like once the tablets appear? The publisher has been showing a demo video to advertisers, industry executives and employees, and I’m trying to convince the company to show it to the rest of the world. (UPDATE: Here’s a partial, low-quality version of the video).

But until then, you can get a sense of it by checking out the publisher’s first attempt to port a magazine to the iPhone, which was released today at the iTunes App Store.

Like the iPhone version of GQ’s December issue, Condé says its tablet magazines will feature the same content found in the print versions, including original advertising, with the ability to view pages in their original form or in formats designed specifically for the device. They will also import multimedia content, like videos, and offer the ability to synch up with social networks and other Web sites.

Condé also thinks the business model for its tablet mags will mirror that of its iPhone app. The company intends to charge readers for each title, and it plans to convince the Audit Bureau of Circulations, the magazine industry’s standards board, that its online sales are equivalent to newsstand sales. That will allow Condé to charge advertisers the same rate as for print ads.

If all of this works, it’s a dream scenario for Condé and other publishers. The magazine industry gets to keep the revenue streams its print publications generate without having to make the “analog dollars for digital pennies” discount that the Web requires. Meanwhile, Condé gets to bask in the benefits of digital–lower distribution costs, more engagement with readers.

Or put another way: Publishers hope the new devices will repair all the value destruction the Web has wrought.

But all of this assumes that consumers, who’ve shown no inclination to pay for this stuff on the Web, will be willing to pay for it once it appears on devices no one owns yet. We’ll find out soon enough.

*One possible exception is the New York Times (NYT), where editor Bill Keller refuses to talk about possible talks with Steve Jobs and company.

It’s not clear if News Corp. (NWS) will end up investing in the joint venture, which is designed to control distribution of “print” content to readers like Amazon’s (AMZN) Kindle and Apple’s (AAPL) rumored tablet, or if the company will simply agree to tailor its stuff–most notably, The Wall Street Journal–to the joint venture’s standards.

In either case, News Corp. has yet to officially sign on, sources tell me. An announcement formally acknowledging the JV itself is supposed to be a couple of weeks away, though I have been hearing this for at least six weeks.

No comment from News Corp. or Time Inc., the Time Warner (TWX) publishing unit that has been assembling the JV. Other expected partners include Hearst, Condé Nast and, perhaps, Meredith. (Disclosure: News Corp. owns Dow Jones, which owns this Web site.)

In some ways, News Corp. is an obvious partner for the coalition, which I like to call “Hulu for magazines.” Murdoch has been an outspoken critic of Amazon’s distribution and pricing policies; he argues that by controlling the subscription of digital newspaper and magazines delivered through its e-reader, Amazon deprives publishers of a valuable asset.

Murdoch also wants more money for the stuff it does sell: In an earnings call last week, he said that while the bookseller was now paying his company up to $6.50 a month for each $15 monthly subscription to The Wall Street Journal, that split wasn’t good enough.

The JV is supposed to solve those problems for publishers by letting them control sales, customer billing and pricing. But it is also primarily designed with magazine publishers in mind, and News Corp. isn’t in that business.

Meanwhile, New Corp.’s Dow Jones unit is proprietary about the system it has already built to handle subscriptions to the Journal’s print and online editions and its BlackBerry and iPhone apps.

While it’s possible that the JV could use the Dow Jones subscription/commerce platform as the technological base of the JV, Dow Jones could be prickly if asked to play well with others. “Newspapers and magazines, don’t mix well, for reasons that aren’t obvious to the outside world,” says a News Corp. executive briefed on some of the company’s conversations.

In any event, balancing different partners’ interests is only one of the hurdles facing the JV. Some others, from the story I published last month:

• They’ll have to convince consumers who already have billing relationships with Amazon, Apple and other vendors to sign up with yet another service.
• They’ll have to convince device makers to play along with the strategy, which runs counter to many of their own plans. Both Amazon and Apple, for instance, have intentionally created closed systems that give them control of both devices and distribution.
• They’ll have to create content consumers want to buy. The new product can’t simply be a digital version of the magazines they’re already printing: That’s already available on the Web, and consumers have shown almost no interest in paying for it, and advertisers haven’t fully embraced it either.

So what exactly will the JV be selling? That’s probably the most difficult question for publishers to answer, made even more difficult because they don’t know what capabilities the e-readers of the future will boast. Apple for instance, refuses to even acknowledge to Time Inc. executives that it plans to produce a tablet device, let alone provide them with specs.

But if you’re impatient, you can simply look at the following table, which details the publisher’s Q3 performance:

Bewkes has a less drastic spin on the cuts, of course: He argues that among other things, they will help “increase consumer utility.” How’s that? Well, Fortune magazine, for instance, will publish less frequently, which will supposedly make each issue that much better. But you can see where this logic leads…

One item of note so far: While Time Inc. has said that it will not be closing titles during this round of cuts, Bewkes left the door wide open for future moves, promising to “take a hard look at non-strategic and unprofitable titles.”

In the meantime, while I’ve read reports that say folks who work in online operations won’t be affected by the cuts, that’s not the case; I’ve heard of a few different staffers on the Web side who are on their way out.

Here’s the full set of slides Time Warner (TWX) used during the earnings call:

time inc slides –

Shumaker comes to Hearst from DoubleFusion, the “in-game” advertising company, where she ran sales for its core games group, and was at Electronic Arts (ERTS) prior to that. Johnson spent the last three years building Hearst’s magazine sites (Cosmopolitan.com, etc.), then took off this summer to run something called Modelina.com; he has also put in time at IAC (IACI) and Time Warner’s (TWX) AOL.

UGO is one of many players trying to capture a piece of the market for young men between 18 and 34 who like girls, funny things and videogames, and the company, which claims 13 million monthly uniques, is often mentioned as an M&A candidate.

But Hearst says it is still looking to hire a new CEO for the spot that opened up once co-founder J Moses left in June. Hearst Interactive president Ken Bronfin is still running the unit on an interim basis.

The publisher said newspaper revenue dropped 20 percent in the third quarter, and print ads dropped by 28 percent; both of these numbers are worse than Q2, which saw revenue drop by 14 percent and print ads by 20 percent.

No relief from Web ads, either: Internet revenue dropped 18 percent, a decline from the nine percent drop in Q2. And online display ads, which had been more or less flat for the last few quarters, fell off a cliff, dropping 14 percent.

Don’t be duped by headlines reporting a drop in the newspaper division’s losses, by the way. That’s due to one-time accounting charges the previous year. If you look at operating revenue and expenses via a less formal, but more practical, lens, the results are very unpleasant: Losses increased by 55 percent (see summary below; click to enlarge).

Want more bad news? Okay: The company’s magazine group says revenue dropped 33 percent, driven by a staggering 48 percent drop in ad sales at Newsweek.

If you’re at, say, Time Warner’s (TWX) Time Inc. and want to whistle past the graveyard, you can try blaming the drop on the title’s unsuccessful overhaul. But I find it hard to believe that Newsweek’s woes don’t reflect a larger magazine malaise. We’ll see next week.

The good news, as always: The big difference between the Post and many other publishers is that its parent company doesn’t depend on print media. The company’ core education business, which is what has sustained it for many years, continues to do well.

That works out to less than $15,000 for each of the magazine’s 400+ employees.

That doesn’t exactly synch up with the reporting we’ve seen about the sale. BusinessWeek, among others, has pegged the sale price at somewhere between $2 million and $5 million, plus the assumption of liabilities, which could be tens of millions. Anyone with accounting expertise want to weigh in?

It’s possible that McGraw-Hill will discuss the sale during its earnings call this morning, though I wouldn’t bet on it: BusinessWeek is one of the company’s most visible brands, but it’s barely material to its business.

UPDATE: There was indeed a bit of discussion about the sale. The company confirmed the $5 million sale price, and said Bloomberg “will assume certain liabilities including our unfulfilled subscription liabilities”. I still don’t understand how it gets to the $9.3 million and $5.9 million numbers, but that’s mostly academic at this point.

How will McGraw-Hill fare without BusinessWeek? Pretty well, it seems. The company will lose around $100 million in revenue next year, but still end up saving $20 million to $25 million without having to foot the magazine’s bill, executives said.

The publisher plans to start selling digital copies of its print titles via a yet-to-be-approved app. Condé will start with the December issue of GQ, which it will sell for $2.99 (versus a newsstand price of $4.99), but the idea is that the publisher can use the same technology to sell other issues of other magazines down the road.

Condé says the GQ digital issue will replicate the print one on a page-by-page basis, including the ads. Digital bonuses include related videos, as well as links to sites for products (clothing, music, etc.) featured in the issue.

I wasn’t able to attend Condé’s presentation this morning, so I can’t tell you how its attempt to transfer a rich glossy magazine onto a phone (or iPod touch) actually works. But for now, I’ll take the company’s word for it and assume that it’s a nice alternative to carrying around some dead trees.

The interesting question is the business model, which I think has some real potential. This doesn’t solve Condé’s core problem–its costs are too high to support its shrinking ad revenue–but it does have several things going for it.

For one, this approach reaches its potential readers where they are: I don’t want to read a magazine at my desk, and I’m far from sold on the idea of buying a specialized reader to consume it digitally. Getting it to me on my phone, which goes wherever I do, is the way to go.

It also generates some (potential) additional revenue for Condé Nast right off the bat without creating a channel conflict with its analog product line: Condé will be able to count any magazines sold via its app platform toward its audited circulation numbers, a trick that no publisher has been able to pull off with Web products so far. Meanwhile advertisers in the print publication who want to add digital links to the iPhone version will pay a premium, Condé says. And the publisher has been able to extract additional dollars from Grey Goose and Gillette, which will be “premium sponsors” of the GQ issue.

Bonus upside: Condé says the technology it has assembled for this effort should work well for future Apple (AAPL) products, like, say, its mythical tablet. “We think that the minute Apple is ready, if they ever are, to announce that they’re going forward with a tablet, that we’ll be ahead of everybody,” says Sarah Chubb, president of Condé Nast Digital.

This doesn’t solve the distribution issue that Condé and other publishers have with Apple, Amazon (AMZN) and other potential digital delivery outfits: Apple, not Condé, will control the billing relationship for the app. But then again, Condé doesn’t get to interact with you when you buy a magazine at a newsstand either, so at least it’s not getting disintermediated.

The question, as always, is whether customers are willing to pay anything at all for content they’ve been getting free on the Web. I still think we’re going to end up with a small segment of people willing to pay up for specialized stuff and a very large group that are going to end up with free things of dubious value. It would be great to be proved wrong, though.

There will be more to come at the publisher, which shut down four magazines last week and is trying to bring down costs at its remaining titles by 25 percent. “Everybody’s tense and anxious here,” says a still-employed Condé Nast worker. “A terrible environment. We know the layoffs are coming but don’t know how many or when.”

Statement from Condé spokeswoman Maurie Perl:

We announced last week when we closed the four titles that there would be companywide expense cost reductions and some workforce reductions in association with the 2010 budget process. These Vogue layoffs are  part of that and we have no further comment on the subject.

A reminder: Vogue’s September 2007 issue was supposedly the biggest in magazine history, and its production has been chronicled in a documentary you can see in theaters today. But Vogue’s September 2009 issue’s ad count was down more than 50 percent compared with the previous year.

That’s the high end of the range Bloomberg will be paying for BusinessWeek, reports BusinessWeek, which has done an excellent job of covering its sale. One important note to make about the price: Those liabilities could total up to $32 million, although it’s not clear whether Bloomberg will assume all of them.

Can’t call this one a surprise, as Bloomberg has reportedly been the lead bidder for some time now. BusinessWeek employees spent most of the day waiting for an announcement to that effect, and finally heard one, via Bloomberg’s wire service, shortly after 5 pm EDT.

Shortly after, BusinessWeek Editor Stephen J. Adler gathered his troops for an informal meeting to discuss the news and to discuss some blocking and tackling: No news on rumored (and expected) layoffs. But he did tell staffers that those who are cut after the deal closes later this year will receive the same severance package they would have gotten if they were still employed by McGraw-Hill (MHP), the magazine’s parent company.

There most certainly will be cuts: McGraw-Hill is selling the 80-year-old magazine because it’s a money pit that was losing between $20 million and $40 million a year, depending on your accounting. And the publisher’s bankers promoted a layoff plan as part of the sales process.

What exactly deep-pocketed Bloomberg intends to do with the publication, however, is unclear. The company, which makes its money renting its namesake terminals to Wall Street traders, is thought to be running its magazine and TV news operations at a loss as it tries to grab a footprint in consumer media. It may ultimately be willing to run BusinessWeek at a loss for a while, as well.

And now a tiny bit of context: At the beginning of this year, there were four major business magazines. Now one, Condé Nast’s Portfolio, has been shut down and another sold at a fire-sale price. Meanwhile, my former colleagues at Forbes expect to hear about yet another restructuring round in the near future. And while Time Warner (TWX) CEO Jeff Bewkes was careful to list Fortune magazine among the core assets at his company’s Time Inc. unit at an industry event today, that can’t assure the queasy souls who work there.

Here’s the memo to BusinessWeek staff from the magazine’s BusinessWeek publisher, Keith Fox:

All,

Moments ago, McGraw-Hill announced that Bloomberg L.P. has agreed to acquire BusinessWeek. This is exciting news on many levels. Joining forces with another of the world’s leading news organizations enhances BusinessWeek’s ability to further serve our global audience and our valued customers. And Bloomberg will gain a powerful brand with a history of editorial excellence and strong reach among business professionals.

While the ink is barely dry and the long-term plans are being worked out, we do know that Bloomberg is committed to and values our brand, our editorial integrity, and our ability to drive advertising, circulation, and new digital revenue.

BusinessWeek will strengthen Bloomberg’s online, television and mobile products and creates an opportunity for Bloomberg News to reach decision makers in the c-suite. Online, BusinessWeek.com and Bloomberg.com will have more unique visitors than any non-portal business and financial site. In addition, Bloomberg expects to build television content around the powerful BusinessWeek brand and our world-class journalists.

I am tremendously proud of the work all of you have done in the past few months. Despite the uncertainty, we have continued to produce first-class products for our readers and advertisers, and I want to thank you deeply for your efforts. I also want to thank Steve Adler, Jessica Sibley, Tania Secor, Roger Neal, and Linda Brennan, for their extraordinary ability to personify the best of BusinessWeek during the deal process while leading their respective organizations.

I know that while this announcement answers some of the questions you’ve been asking over the past few months, it raises others. The sale is expected to close by the end of the year and we will be working on transition plans in the coming weeks. I can tell you that all BusinessWeek staffers will remain employees of The McGraw-Hill Companies until the transaction closes, and that it will be business as usual–producing the magazine and the website, and serving our advertisers–through the close. We will give you more details when we can.

We’ll be holding a town hall meeting later today at 5:45 EST, after which a Q&A will be provided to all employees; you will receive more details shortly. A call for the Asia teams will be scheduled shortly.

Again, I want to thank you all for your professionalism and dedication during a challenging time. I look forward to working with you on the promising next chapter in BusinessWeek’s history.

Keith

At a TVWeek conference in Manhattan, Bewkes repeated arguments he has made in the past: Chiefly, that big media mergers have a lousy track record and that he couldn’t see how Comcast (CMCSA) could unlock any value by buying a majority stake in NBC Universal from GE (GE).

“Somebody has finally noticed that these things don’t work out so well,” he said, adding “We love to see our competitors taking risks.”

But just to hammer that point home, Bewkes compared the proposed deal to the one his company made nine years ago when it embarked on an ill-fated merger with AOL. That deal (made when Bewkes was running Time Warner’s HBO unit)  “basically made no sense” at the time, he said.

The main talking point in favor of that transaction–that connecting Time Warner’s content with AOL’s Internet distribution would create synergy–was “nonsensical,” he said. But “these kind of arguments, you’ll hear some of them this week, in the other merger that we’ve been talking about,” Bewkes said.

Clear enough?

Wall Street, by the way, remains unimpressed with the proposed deal as well: Comcast shares are down about 10 percent since word got out.

In other reiteration news, Bewkes also said, again, that he doesn’t plan on selling his Time Inc. publishing unit. Though he left himself a tiny window of wiggling room by noting that “no public company can ever say that it wouldn’t consider restructuring some part, whether it’s Warner, HBO, whatever.”

But Bewkes insisted that Time Inc.’s best-known magazine brands, including “Time, People, Sports Illustrated, InStyle,” are holding their own as print products and that the challenge will be turning them into online successes.

“We have basically a healthy business in terms of our relationship with readers. These brands mean something and they’re evolving…,” he said. “If you can’t take the leading titles that people have known for decades, and use the new world to make them relevant, really, shame on us.”

It’s not a huge shock to see some of those titles go: Cookie, for instance, wasn’t a prestige title for Condé–like Domino, which the publisher closed down earlier this year, it was founded in 2005.

But Gourmet is one of Condé Nast’s most famous titles, and editor Ruth Reichl is one of Condé’s best-known editors. Most observers would have figured that Bon Appétit would go instead. CEO Chuck Townsend says the Gourmet brand will live on, zombie-style, via TV and publishing deals.

Condé has long cultivated a reputation as the magazine world’s most glamorous outpost, impervious to the petty concerns that bedeviled lesser folk. But the double-punch of the ad industry’s move away from print titles and a recession that pole-axed the luxury brands Condé depends on, has staggered the publisher. (Disclosure: I do some free-lance work for Condé title Vanity Fair).

Signs of trouble showed up late last year when the publisher made uncharacteristic staffing cuts. And in 2009, it began shuttering magazines: In addition to Domino, it closed Portfolio in April, just two years after a high-profile launch.

By July, Townsend had brought on consultants from McKinsey and Company to help figure out where else it could trim; the news that September ad pages would be down anywhere from 17 percent to 47 percent made it clear that other titles would be going.

I wouldn’t expect this to be the last big set of magazine cuts, by the way: Time Warner (TWX), for instance, has made it clear that it wants to hang on to Time Inc. but that it thinks the publisher employs too many people who produce too many titles.

Here are the details on the Condé cuts, via an internal memo (intended for public consumption) from Chuck Townsend:

From: “Townsend, Chuck”
Date: Mon, 5 Oct 2009 10:16:52 -0400
To: Conde Nast Publications-All <_273fee@condenast.com>
Conversation: Announcing Changes within Condé Nast
Subject: Announcing Changes within Condé Nast

We have now completed an extensive review of our business–an important undertaking given the dramatic changes in the U.S. economy. The review has led us to a number of decisions designed to navigate the company through the economic downturn and to position us to take advantage of coming opportunities.

Condé Nast’s success comes from the ability of our publications to attract readers with a wide range of interests, as well as advertisers who value them. But in this economic climate it is important to narrow our focus to titles with the greatest prospects for long-term growth.

As a result of our review, Brides will increase its frequency to monthly to solidify its position as the most important brand in the bridal category, and Modern Bride and Elegant Bride will close.

Gourmet magazine will cease monthly publication, but we will remain committed to the brand, retaining Gourmet’s book publishing and television programming, and Gourmet recipes on Epicurious.com. We will concentrate our publishing activities in the epicurean category on Bon Appétit.

Finally, Cookie magazine will be discontinued, and resources that had been dedicated to its publishing will be invested elsewhere.

The editorial and business staffs of Modern Bride, Elegant Bride, Gourmet, and Cookie all have earned their magazines large and devoted followings. We have been proud to publish these titles, and we are grateful to the staffs for their hard work and dedication.

These changes, combined with cost and workforce reductions now underway throughout the company, will speed the recovery of our current businesses and enable us to pursue new ventures. In the coming weeks, we hope to announce initiatives to develop digital versions of our brands that will make use of new devices and distribution channels.

Condé Nast is now in its 100th year of creating the most respected and iconic brands in the publishing world. These changes will ensure that our unique publishing company will continue in its preeminent position for many years to come.

Squires has spent the past few months convincing other publishers to join a new joint venture aimed at a market that doesn’t really exist yet–magazine-like publications to be delivered via e-readers like Amazon’s Kindle and Apple’s rumored tablet.

The idea: The new company, which will operate independently from the publishers that invest in it, will create a digital storefront where consumers can purchase and manage their subscriptions, which can be delivered to any device. The pitch: Control a direct relationship with consumers while gaining leverage with heavyweights like Apple (AAPL) and Amazon (AMZN).

Industry executives briefed on Squires’s plan say it has been well received by Time Inc.’s peers and that several major publishers, including Hearst and Condé Nast, are expected to sign on for the JV, which isn’t scheduled to debut until 2010. No comment from Hearst, Condé Nast or Time Inc., a unit of Time Warner (TWX).

Many of the venture’s big details have yet to be hammered down. At one point, for instance, Time Inc. had explored the idea of including newspapers in the new company’s offering, sources say. The JV may also want to include a noncontent partner as an investor, as Hulu did with Providence Equity and as Vevo, the “Hulu for music” JV that Universal Music is creating with Google’s (GOOG) YouTube, plans to do. That approach is supposed to appease antitrust regulators’ worries about a group of content companies banding together.

But the rough outlines of Squires’s plan are attractive enough to publishers, who are hopeful that mobile devices like the Kindle will create a new market for them. And if that market does show up, they want to make sure they’re the ones in charge of sales and distribution. That’s been a huge problem for the music industry, whose digital sales are essentially controlled by Apple. And it has already cropped up as a point of contention with Amazon, which currently handles sales for all content delivered via its Kindle reader.

Other selling points for the JV: The ability to set standards for mobile content and the ability to integrate advertising into the publications. One thing the company isn’t supposed to do: Create an e-reader itself.

The takeaway, via a Time Inc. presentation that has circulated among publishers: “our destiny with readers, advertisers and distributors … [is] in our hands.”

Of course, there are plenty of hurdles facing the joint venture, starting with the fact that media joint ventures have a checkered record at best (though Hearst and Condé, for instance, have already partnered on Comag, a wholesale distribution company). But there are bigger problems for Squires and company. For instance:

• They’ll have to convince consumers who already have billing relationships with Amazon, Apple and other vendors to sign up with yet another service.
• They’ll  have to convince device makers to play along with the strategy, which runs counter to many of their own plans. Both Amazon and Apple, for instance, have intentionally created closed systems that give them control of both devices and distribution.
• They’ll have to create content consumers want to buy. The new product can’t simply be a digital version of the magazines they’re already printing: That’s already available on the Web, and consumers have shown almost no interest in paying for it, and advertisers haven’t fully embraced it either.

So what exactly will the JV be selling? That’s probably the most difficult question for publishers to answer, made even more difficult because they don’t know what capabilities the e-readers of the future will boast. Apple for instance, refuses to even acknowledge to Time Inc. executives that it plans to produce a tablet device, let alone provide them with specs.

But publishers feel they’ve got nothing to lose by trying. “We know that traditional magazines are going away, and that magazines on the Web don’t work,” says a publishing executive working on the plan. “But this gives us a chance to serve the reader who will pay for content, and provide advertising that really works. Can you think of a better idea?”