Rolling Stone magazine is abandoning its signature large format and will scale down to standard magazine size in an October redesign.

The magazine that defined counterculture with its rough paper and unusual size will feature glossy paper and a glued spine, replacing the current staples.

"It feels to me just like a natural step for us to take," Rolling Stone's managing editor Will Dana said Monday after announcing the redesign. "It's always exciting to shake things up a bit and to grow and to do things differently."

Rolling Stone is making the changes, to take effect with the Oct. 17 issue, to improve newsstand sales, which have slumped recently.

Apparently retailers don't like the large format, and either put it on lower shelves or allow it to curl over because it doesn't quite fit the display rack.

Wenner Media, publisher of Rolling Stone, said circulation is at an all-time high of 1.5 million, but single-copy sales fell from 119,735 in the first half of 2007 to 115,644 in 2008.

"We've been challenged at the newsstand recently, which is an industry-wide trend, and the decline pretty much mirrors where we are vis-a-vis our competitors," Dana told Reuters.

The redesigned magazine will have more pages than the old Rolling Stone and the glued format will allow advertising inserts.

There is pressure in the magazine industry to move to a standard format to improve distribution and handling and only a few magazines still retain non-standard sizing.

Rolling Stone has sported the large format since it began covering pop culture in 1967.

Founder and publisher Jann Wenner admitted it is hard to let it go.

"I myself was kind of torn about it," he told the New York Times.

But he said while the old format might have a "nostalgia" attraction for the baby boom generation, today's Rolling Stone reader doesn't care.

Market research firms say the average Rolling Stone reader is in his or her 30s, part of a generation that moves easily from big screen to iPhone to computer.

Wenner said Rolling Stone sent a new format edition of the magazine to a sample of its readers in June, with positive results.

The new format allows for more pictures and better design of longer articles, he said.