The demise of the annuals

I've noticed recently that the age old tradition of getting comic annuals at Christmas is fast dying out. Two years ago, I got five annuals - The Beano, The Dandy, Dennis and Gnasher, The Bash Street Kids and the Beano-Dandy reprints annual (which this year has a free Dennis 1996 cartoon DVD and a reproduction of a 1951 Beano, something they haven't done previously). But 2010's Bash Street annual and 2011's Dennis annual turned out to be the last, so this year, I'm only getting three. Most annuals these days seem to be licensed books with feature material and no comic strips. Boring! Twenty years ago, there was a multitude of proper comic annuals for kids to open on Christmas Day. Now, they're released in July - rather than September - which is turning them into a summer treat instead. If you can even get hold of them that is. WHSmith, Waterstones, that's about it where I live. Maybe Tesco, but their range is always poor. Oh, how I wish the selection was more like that of twenty years ago. Back then, you would often find annuals for titles which closed years ago, alongside all the popular current comic titles. There were fewer licensed titles, and the majority of annuals did contain comic strips, unlike today. I always used to get the Beezer Book. The last one was the 2003 edition - the comic itself folded 10 years earlier. Oh I wish we could turn back the clock. The annuals do sell a lot better than the weekly comics do. So why aren't there more of them? And why release them six months before Christmas? Illogical. Especially when they also release "summer annuals" which for the Beano means a book mainly filled with reprints, with a 3D glasses gimmick (and most of the others, except for Broons/Oor Wullie, are activity books by another name). And which I never saw in the shops. Pretty obvious why. Summer Special comics have died out too, do they think gimmicks and calling them annuals will bring them back, because I don't.