Instead of typing a program in a book, why not have your computer scan it? That’s the idea behind the Cauzin Softstrip Reader that will read 2D Bar codes into a computer as a means of loading software.
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It was a brief time, but I do remember some magazines bought into printing these strips. There’s an article in this magazine, as well as an advert
I remember seeing few programs done that way, But for the the life of me, I can’t remember
were one got a reader from.
“Hey, let’s spend the price of a floppy drive on a device that can only read a small amount of software from certain publications!”
I guess, when 5.25" floppies were still too fragile to ship with a publication and you were all minded about distribution (or receiving such distributed software), it was still a viable option…
(Also, the fun probably really begins, when yoiu start saving your data by printing your own code strip. What floppy drive could campare to this sort of entertainment? 
)
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It’s a good point, there came a time when magazines might have a cover disk - or a cover tape, or a cover CD. But for me those disks would have been the hard-shelled 3" disks. Of course this would increase the cost of the magazine.
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Indeed, those cover disks could be very expensive. It wasn’t just the manufacturing of the disks and the production cost of glueing them to the cover, which was bad enough, but also the fact that they had a nasty habit of coming unglued. That made the magazine unsaleable by the retailer, which meant a higher level of returns (many magazines were distributed on a sale-or-return basis), thus increasing the overall cost of the issue and hitting circulation figures. Then there was the support cost of readers calling to complain ‘my disk doesn’t work’. Of course, once a few magazines did cover-mount disks, everyone had to do them.
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I’ve a feeling that in the US, magazines often came in the mail, and the postal service had special pricing for that. It might be that cover disks wouldn’t be viable in that world.
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You might be right. Back when I was still in the magazine biz (1980s to early 2000s) it was the case that US magazines lived or died by subscriptions. The US was too big to have the same kind of distribution networks that you had in the UK. That’s why, when you bought a new issue of a US magazine, the first thing that would happen is that half-a-dozen subscription cards would fall out of it. And there would be more stitched or stapled inside. They really needed those mail subs.
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You can’t blame it all on the post. I was planning to order a subscription for Wireless World once
but they changed their payment plan, to US dollars for overseas, [from] UK Pounds. Here in Canada I would pay 50% more to convert to US,
and the US Dollar had a 50% exchange rate to Pounds on the subscription.They may have
also done something foolish with postal service as well like from standard mail to express.
At that time I as getting out of short wave radio and into computers, so saving for a computer had more priority, than Wireless World.
I think it’s always expensive to get things from overseas, whichever side of the sea you happen to live on.
For myself, I discovered Wireless World and subscribed for a year, but then felt that I’d picked the exact moment that the quality of the content had gone down.
[Edit: I tweaked your post Ben to avoid a derail.]
That, and the fact that modems and local calls were much more affordable in North America than in the UK. Maybe cover disks didn’t need to happen outside the UK
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I think, data calls being regular phone calls (charged per minute, mabe out-of-town, maybe overseas, if a direct dial-in) was a general phenomenon in Europe. Subscriber flat rates were mostly unknown. – So, cover disks were highly welcome.
(I remember how revolutionary it was, when we [in Austria] got a special call-code zone for data providers, which was even cheaper than local calls. But this was only in the late 1990s – and it was still charged per minute.)
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Why not barcoding with software and data the envelope and cover of the floppy disk to extend capacity?