Once the mobile phone had more and more-up-to-date material available there were fewer reasons to buy a magazine.
Nowadays a magazine is something I purchase as a luxury when I specifically want to be offline and without distractions (but even there my Kindle usually does the job just as well).
I must say I miss the quality and depth of writing that one got in Byte and PCW of yesteryear - even though I recognise that the online stuff often exceeds it in both breadth and quality.
With the modern Internet you go right to what you want and rarely see links to things you don't know about already - magazines were great for that, especially on a train ride where you have nothing much better to do than read the "other parts".
My worry is the online stuff is going to fade away as well. After all what's the point of publishing online if some AI is going to regurgitate your hard work for $20/month.
As someone who grew up in the country without even access to a library, the monthly computer mag was my only source of info and my escape from the world I was in. So there certainly is a good deal of positive nostalgia and sadness.
On the other hand it feels kind of outlandish that some of these magazines survived until this day. The last time I bought a mag was probably more than a quarter of a century ago
There is some kind of vicious cycle going on I'm sure - where fewer people are buying magazines, so stores have less reason to stock them, so there are fewer opportunities to buy them, so fewer people buy magazines.
Probably a few will survive as niche items at a higher price. I think I'll be ok with that. One would imagine that print-on-demand solutions will emerge for the remaining (or even emerging) niche titles. I'd be nervous to start something new on that basis though.
Perhaps the remnants hung on after that because it took people 15 years to get their cancellations accepted ;)
1995 Computer Shopper was going strong, Wired had only been around for a couple years. Music and woodworking mags were still decent... no, I think the 90s was a great magazine time.
I got a lifetime subscription for 2600 from my parents when I was in high school, and I subscribed to Eighty only a few years ago. My biggest gripe with larger magazines is all the ads, and uninteresting content throughout them; typically I only end up reading one or two articles and then the whole magazine feels like a bit of a waste. both 2600 and Eighty have very little/no ads, and feel more niche and content focused. Eighty is actually printed like a very nice paperback book.
The ads essentially pay for everything and your subscription is just profit. This was super obvious 20ish years ago, when you could subscribe to a bunch of them for free despite the cover price being ~$4-5+. I haven't looked in years, but there used to be websites that would list ones that you could get for free. I had Maxim for years because it could it get it for free. A bunch of gamer type ones always had it where you could get a year or more for free. I think we used to always get PC Gamer or something similar for free when I was a kid.
I would highly recommend them to anyone interested, they’re also surprisingly re-readable.
RIP. I suspect there are some copies in a stack somewhere in my possession. I really enjoyed wondering which software I would learn about each month.
I do wonder if this is entirely true. Some print magazines I would have liked to subscribe to made it unpalatable in one way or another (dubious cancellation mechanisms etc.)
I looked at subscribing to several magazines within the last few months. One had no explicit cancellation mechanism, one would have been delivered to a courier office several miles away and this one was no longer accepting subscriptions.
I'm sure it's hard to make this work - but perhaps there are self-inflicted speedbumps here as well?
I don't need a magazine, the content is free on HN, so minor inconveniences will prevent me from subscribing. If customers really needed this magazine they wouldn't care about how hard it is to cancel, and the magazine would probably make it easy to cancel because they would have better revenue streams to chase.
I think those are comparable. The major intrinsic advantage they have is that they offer immediate gratification. The non-intrinsic advantage they have is that they're low commitment.
When you could pick up a relevant magazine in a shop that had both characteristics. Now it has neither and one of them's self-inflicted.
i grew up obsessed with the idea of magazines in general. some of my favorites included EGM, MacAddict (especially the first few years - i'd probably think the "attitude" annoying nowadays but younger me LOVED it), 2600 (still subscribed) and so many more i've forgotten over the years. almost every magazine i cared about is gone now except 2600, which survives i think mainly as a labor of love but maybe the editor team still makes a living from it.
to me, a magazine represents something more than just the raw content - others have mentioned the benefit of being exposed to more topics than you might have initially been interested in (i know i learned a lot more about storage technologies from linux magazines as a kid who never had access to fancy RAID/SAS hardware than i otherwise would have). there's also something nice about a publication with a variety of authors that are all wrangled together under a good editorial team that makes everything feel so much more cohesive than a lot of team-published blogs/online things. i also always really enjoyed the physicality of magazines, from displaying years-long collections to the idea of just pulling an old issue off the shelf to revisit a time in the past. blogs etc just don't do anything for me - i find a lot of what i read online just leaks out of my brain compared to printed publications. layouts - what a herculean effort even in the days of QuarkXpress! a blog with a nice stylesheet just doesn't compare, personally.
i'm glad that there's still a fairly vibrant zine community out there but as a rule, they're often one-person labors of love. even the venerable Maximum Rocknroll went digital-only because of the cost and effort required to wrangle articles from submissions all over the world.
if i may... everybody, go subscribe to 2600 right now. it's not expensive, and the quality varies, but that's because it's all user submissions - write your own articles! it's really one of the only fully-independent tech publications that still exists and it's truly the treasure of a scene that's changed wildly since it's inception.
pjmlp•1d ago
Yeah most newstands are quite a sad picture from technical magazines versus 30 - 40 years ago.