Books[edit]

Nonfiction books with the Reader's Digest brand and yearly collections of the magazine's content are currently published by Trusted Media Brands, sold through their website and distributed to retailers by Simon & Schuster.^[42]


Since 1950, Reader's Digest has published a direct mail series of hardcover anthologies containing abridged novels and nonfiction. The series was originally called Reader's Digest Condensed Books and renamed in 1997 to Reader's Digest Select Editions.


From the mid-1960s to early 1980s, full-length, original works of non-fiction were published under the imprint Reader's Digest Press and distributed by Thomas Y. Crowell Co. Beginning in 1982, a series of classic novels was published as World's Best Reading and made available by mail order to magazine subscribers.


In Germany, Reader's Digest runs an own book-publishing house called Verlag Das Beste which not only publishes the German edition of the Reader's Digest magazine. Since 1955, it has published Reader's Digest Auswahlbücher (a German edition of Reader's Digest Condensed Books). Besides publishing the magazine, the publisher is especially well known in Germany for the science fiction anthology Unterwegs in die Welt von Morgen ("The Road to Tomorrow"), consisting of 50 hardcover volumes of classic science fiction novels (such as Robert A. Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, Arthur C. Clarke's 2001, or Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, usually two novels per volume) published between 1986 and 1995.^[43] More recent book series by the publisher include Im Spiegel der Zeit ("Reflections of the Times", a series of recent newspaper or magazine reports) and Klassiker der Weltliteratur ("World Literature Classics").