Business Notes PUBLISHING

"That is a good book which is opened with expectation and closed with profit," wrote American educator Bronson Alcott. Whittle Communications couldn't agree more. The Knoxville-based company plans to publish a series of books that will contain a radically new profit-making device: advertising. While paperbacks have sometimes been sprinkled with ads, such come-ons have almost never appeared between hard covers.

The books, constituting a series called The Larger Agenda, will be business- oriented analyses of 100 or so pages, written by such authors as David Halberstam, John Kenneth Galbraith and George Gilder for fees of about $60,000. Each book will be initially distributed free to some 150,000 opinion leaders, including executives and politicians, and later sold in bookstores. The advertising income will finance the giveaways and help keep the retail price of the books relatively low, while still ensuring a healthy profit margin for Whittle, which is 50% owned by the Time Inc. Magazine Co., the publisher of TIME.

Will Whittle start a trend? Not everywhere. Declares Roger Straus, chief executive of the Farrar, Straus & Giroux publishing house: "We would certainly not condone the use of advertising in our books." Thus the prospect of Joe Isuzu popping up in Pride and Prejudice is not quite at hand.