Reader's Digest is an American general-interest family magazine, published ten times a year. Formerly based in Pleasantville, New York, it is now headquartered in Midtown Manhattan. The magazine was founded in 1922, by DeWitt Wallace and Lila Bell Wallace.
The first "Word Power" column of the magazine was published in the January 1945 edition, written by Wilfred J. Funk. In December 1952 the magazine published "Cancer by the Carton", a series of articles that linked smoking with lung cancer.
In 1990, the magazine's parent company, The Reader's Digest Association, Inc. (RDA), became a publicly traded corporation.
In 2006, the magazine published three more local-language editions in Slovenia, Croatia, and Romania. In October 2007, the Digest expanded into Serbia. The magazine's licensee in Italy stopped publishing in December 2007. The magazine launched in The People's Republic of China in 2008.
Over the 90 years, the company has published editions in various languages in different countries, or for different regions. Local editions that still publish the bulk of the American Reader's Digest are usually titled with a qualifier, such as for instance 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).
1938 - United Kingdom (sold in 2010, operated under licence)
1940 - Cuba and Latin America (in Spanish) (as Selecciones)
1942 - Brazil
1943 - Sweden, Egypt (Arabic) (Al-Mukhtar)
1945 - Finland (Valitut palat)
1946 - Australia, Denmark, Japan
1947 - Belgium (in French), Norway, Canadian French
1947 - France (Sélection Du Reader's Digest)
1948 - Canada (English), Japan (operations discontinued in 1985), South Africa, Switzerland (in French and German)
1948 - Italy (Selezione Dal Reader's Digest) operations discontinued in 2007
1948 - Germany (Das Beste Reader's Digest)
1950 - Argentina, New Zealand
1952 - Austria
1952 - Spain (Selecciones del Reader's Digest)
1954 - India and Pakistan (in English)
1957 - Netherlands
1959 - Chile, Costa Rica and Central America
1965 - Taiwan, Hong Kong and Southeast Asia (in Traditional Chinese)
1968 - Belgium (Dutch)
1971 - Puerto Rico and United States (in Spanish),
1971 - Portugal (Selecções Do Reader's Digest)
1978 - South Korea (operations discontinued in 2009)
1991 - Hungary, Russia
1993 - Czech Republic
1995 - Poland
1996 - Thailand (operations discontinued in 2014)
1997 - Slovakia
2004 - Indonesia (operations discontinued in October 2015)
2005 - Romania, Slovenia, Croatia, Bulgaria
2007 - Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Ukraine
2008 - China (operations discontinued in 2012)
