Exhibit 99.4


Remarks delivered by Thomas D. Gardner, Senior Vice President, Reader's Digest
International, to analysts and investors on January 26, 2005.


Thank you, Gary, and good morning. The last time I addressed this group was 21
months ago, right after I assumed responsibility for the International Division.
The Division was just completing a second year of massive profit decline from
the peak profit year of fiscal 2001.

In that call, I announced the turnaround strategy for the division. The goal was
to stop the bleeding immediately, and then return the division to consistent
profit growth and cash flow generation, on sustainable revenues. We said we
would accomplish that using a three-part strategy - Restructure, Restore and
Invest: to Restructure the division to align costs with the revenue base, to
Restore best practices in running our core business more efficiently and
effectively, and to Invest in new businesses that could drive long term revenue
and profit growth.

For 21 months, we have followed this strategy with discipline, and I am pleased
to report that we have made significant progress, even ahead of our own
ambitious goals. We have just completed an exceptional first half of fiscal '05,
and we are well on the way to our second consecutive recovery year of
double-digit profit growth.

The second quarter is our largest profit quarter of the year. Last year we made
$24 million in the quarter, and this year we made $41 million. A small portion,
around $4 million, of this increase was due to foreign exchange. The balance
reflects a solid combination of cost efficiencies and much more profitable
mailing campaigns.

We conducted roughly 200 mailing campaigns in the quarter throughout RD
International. Many of these were catalogs, and the rest were largely single
sales products: books, music and videos. Catalog mailings were very strong for
the quarter, collectively up about 6% versus our forecast. Single sales mailings
were also very strong. All told, we forecast about 4 million orders in mailing
campaigns in the second quarter, and we exceeded that by about 200,000 orders.

It was particularly gratifying in the quarter to see revenues trending better
and profits recovering in key markets like Germany, the UK and Australia. In
fact, almost every International operation improved earnings.

I will come back to our outlook in a few minutes. First, I'd like to take each
aspect of our strategy - Our Restructure, Restore and Invest approach and
discuss how we have implemented it, how this has led to our improved
performance, and how the strategy is evolving to drive future growth.

The "Restructuring" strategy initially took the form of a large downsizing that
took place in the calendar year 2003, driven by five principal approaches.

      First, we consolidated four countries into a Central Europe region
      including Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary.

      Second, we consolidated nine countries into a region called BNI,
      comprising Benelux, the Nordics and Iberia.

      Third, we conducted process redesign within and across our three largest
      countries, that is, the UK, Germany and France

      Fourth, we consolidated headquarters support, and Fifth, we reduced
      marginal marketing activity in virtually every market

Through these actions we were able to eliminate about 20% of the International
headcount, reduce other infrastructure costs, eliminate non-value added activity
and save $40 million dollars annually. And, even more important, we did not miss
a beat on execution -- indeed, we improved our execution during this time.

We also shed unproductive assets. We licensed our business in Norway to another
local publisher. We scaled back our businesses in Spain and Sweden and we sold
Moneywise magazine in the UK. In Portugal, Australia, and Hong Kong we sold our
buildings and moved our people to more efficient new locations. These actions
enable us to focus better on our key strategies, generate cash and lower
operating expenses.

Since the downsizing, our focus has shifted to continuous cost control, targeted
at reducing cost of goods sold. We have implemented a number of regional and
local contracts that provide us with more flexibility and lower costs. These
contracts cover manufacturing, fulfillment, lettershop, customer service and
postal. We are also seeking efficiencies by a strategy to harmonize our
publishing and back-end operations on a regional basis, leveraging our scale
without compromising our local voice. For example, we are taking a fulfillment
system we created in the Nordics and exporting it to other European countries.
The next part of the strategy was to restore the business. Our business demands
careful management to maximize efficiency. While the flagging world economy was
certainly hurting our business, some of our mistakes were significantly
compounding our difficulties.

Consequently, we put a major focus on several critical areas to our business,
specifically forecasting, execution and Customer Care.

Forecasting accuracy is critical to our business. We spend virtually all the
money on a campaign before the mailing begins, before we have sold a book and
collected any revenue. Correctly determining the sales that will be generated by
those up-front expenses is critical to maximizing profitability, profit margins,
and optimizing the balance sheet. In the current year, we were right on forecast
through the first four months of the year, and up versus forecast over the last
two months.

Execution had been a huge problem. We suffered through several difficult
outsourcing transitions that affected our customer relationships. These problems
have since been fixed, and around the world, we are monitoring quality execution
very closely and exceeding our internal standards.

We have focused on improving our Customer Care programs to ensure we treat our
customers very well. This has included improving the speed of our order
processing. In both the UK and Germany, we have reduced product return rates by
5 percentage points or more by shipping products 2-3 days faster.

Our business is far more than effective forecasting and low cost execution
however. We rely on creativity - fantastic products, such as our new revised
World Atlas which has been a top seller thus far in a number of markets.... and
a continuous supply of new and innovative direct mail promotion packages. In the
past 21 months, our promotion teams in France, Germany, and, more recently, the
UK, have created one of the strongest promotion flows we have seen in years.
These countries, in addition to our promotion colleagues in North America,
provide most of the promotion packages used worldwide, a clear example of the
power and leverage of our global scale.

The "Restore" strategy is evolving too, and we are now very focused on the most
important fundamentals of the business, starting with stabilizing the customer
base. Over the past three years, our customers have declined by 8% per year. Not
surprisingly, our revenues have declined by 12% per year over the same time (on
a currency neutral basis). But this year, we are forecasting revenues to be
nearly flat (again currency neutral), and customers to be down very slightly. So
we are making substantial progress on these two key leading indicators.

This progress has been achieved by increasing investment in new customer
acquisition...finding new channels to generate new customers... and improved
customer care to keep them. We have a strategy to reach a stable and sustainable
customer base in each market for our core magazine, single sales and series
products. The results in fiscal '05 are clear - we are showing unmistakable
progress in stabilizing the core business on all key metrics. For example,
overall payment rates have increased by 3 points in the past two years, a huge
improvement.

Finally, the Investment portion of our strategy is already paying back. And it
is evolving as well. In our first year, we identified which programs we wanted
to pursue, and then did some initial testing. This year we are launching the
most successful programs, and continue to test others.

One of the first things we did nearly two years ago was create a new country
expansion program. Entering new countries has been Reader's Digest's most
successful growth strategy since we first entered the UK in 1938. Yet, we had
not entered a new country since 1996.

We assessed key success factors in a dozen countries and came up with a short
list, targeting Romania, Croatia, Slovenia and Ukraine for immediate testing. We
tested each between November 2003 and February 2004, and launched all four
between April and July 2004 - just one year after we made our first visits. The
results have been spectacular. We expect to sell over 800,000 books in these
countries this year and achieve significant profits. We are now investigating a
number of new markets. We hope to test several in the fourth quarter and launch
in fiscal '06.

We have also been exporting several U.S. businesses to some of our markets. We
have had the most success with Young Families. Young Families has been part of
the U.S. Company for a decade, and its most successful product is a continuity
series called Sesame Street ABC's, an alphabet series featuring the Sesame
Street characters. It is a terrific product to attract new younger customers. We
have taken this same product, adapted it, tested it and now launched it in the
UK and Germany, and successfully tested it in Russia.

We are having mixed success with the Books Are Fun and Reiman models. We are now
operating Books Are Fun in five markets, Spain, which is progressing nicely,
France and Mexico, which are improving but had tougher than expected fall
seasons, and Italy and Germany, where we are conducting promising tests. We
believe Books Are Fun is a viable opportunity for us in International, and we
expect to show further progress next year. We have tested several
Reiman-inspired magazines but have yet to have a clear cut success, but we
continue testing.

Finally, we have launched an English As A Foreign Language business in a number
of markets, featuring an exciting language learning course called English in 20
Minutes a Day. We have sold over 70,000 of these courses in Central Europe, at a
price point of roughly $100. We are now rolling out in other markets in Asia and
Latin and South America. And we are also testing a magazine and Internet foreign
language business in Mexico and Brazil.

All in all, we are pleased with our track record in new business thus far.

To sum up, our turnaround strategy is in place. We feel it is working and
evolving appropriately. Our expectations for the business are as follows:

   -  We expect to deliver very solid operating profit growth, well into double
      digits, for the full year of fiscal '05.
   -  This would be the second consecutive year of double digit
      profit growth
   -  Profit margins will improve from under 5 percent to 7-8
      percent
   -  The results will be skewed in the coming quarters. The third quarter
      profits will decline versus prior year, but the fourth quarter will be up
      significantly versus prior year. This has nothing to do with the
      underlying trends on the business - rather, we will see significant impact
      from the magazine accounting change and from increased investment in the
      third quarter, as well as some timing issues.
   -  Our long term goals remain a key focal point ......including providing
      consistent double digit profit growth on stable or modestly improving
      revenues. We are optimistic that we can achieve those markers next year.

So, things are much better in the International division and we are looking
forward with far more confidence than we have in the recent past.