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Comment by AmericanChopper | Hacker News Reader

The era of magazines in general has pretty much drawn to a close.

Not as much as you’d think. Businesses like Monocle do pretty well in print, as do a lot of fashion / lifestyle sort of brands.

https://www.monocle.com

If you ever visit London, I highly recommend the MagCulture store. They also have a nice podcast: https://magculture.com/blogs/podcast

It’s definitely not the “default” like it used to be, though.

The reading experience on print is infinitely better, just because it’s not tied to an electronic device. It’s too easy to be distracted on a phone or even an e-reader.

Every magazine, no matter how good the quality, has annoyances on their sites - cookie notices, newsletter sign ups, having to even log in, ads even for subscribers.

For the two magazines I like to read in print (NYRB, LRB), even the ads are useful (mostly new books).

And even digital magazines are somehow feeling the effects: https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/27/23978042/popular-science...

At the time this news came out, I thought PopSci was just no longer publishing on paper, but turns out even the digital magazine model isn't exciting enough to sustain itself sometimes.

I hope not. I still subscribe to several print magazines, and the quality of the content is leaps and bounds better than any of the junk available to read online.

This may be geo dependent. On a recent field trip to the UK I was surprised to see that WH Smith had the same wall of magazines as when I was a kid.

There’s a lot fewer than at their peak in the 90s/00s and they sell less. But they’re still going. (Former UK magazine editor, still write for them sometimes.)

The selection of magazines today at Barnes & Noble is much better than it was at Waldenbooks when I was growing up in the 1980's.

Print I assume you mean

What ARE sales of digital magazines like these days? On the rare occasions that I've had a passing thought to subscribe to one, I found that it's easy to subscribe but hard to unsubscribe, and so I never pulled the trigger.

Then my public library started offering PressReader access for free (well, local property taxes notwithstanding). So, much like Spotify, I basically have a subscription to every magazine on Earth now.

Interestingly, while I used to read stacks and stacks of print magazines back in the day, I very rarely think to even pull up PressReader. When I do, I just skim here and there for a few minutes before closing the app and doing something else.

Digital magazines just don't FEEL like magazines, in the way that actual print magazines used to. They feel like blogs, from the pre-social media era when the Internet was still mostly long-form writing. I don't know if this really says something about the decline of magazines, or my own personal cognitive or attention-span decline after ~15 years of social media consumption.

I read or listen to The Economist and The Atlantic cover to cover. I wouldn't if they didn't have audio editions. Social media and HN vie for my attention - I try to ignore.

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