I have always loved magazines. But, as with many others of my generation and older, I lost the habit once phones became ubiquitous.<p>On a Gary Vee podcast, he made a point about how a lot of people who enjoy magazines today remember the experience they had 10-15 years ago. This is an experience absent for many in Gen Z.<p>The inevitable conclusion for magazines is that they will perish, though of course, never completely. I know that it is a tired argument, like those who say print is dead, but the numbers seem to add up for magazines. If you discount digital readership, the habit of reading a magazine has visibly faded.<p>Perhaps the numbers may not agree. Circulation numbers appear to be going up in some countries. But having worked in the space, I think there's a big element of fakery or irrelevance in such numbers - old readers who renew subscriptions, or bulk orders from institutions that will simply leave them lying around. There is a clear failure to find new readers, to build a magazine reading habit in people who never had one. The exceptions may be only for the well-known premium mags, like The Economist or maybe Foreign Affairs.<p>Magazine-reading may be dead, but the habit of reading books, it not. I think there's still a thriving community of book readers, enough so that the typical best books list on Amazon will have thousands of reviews.<p>Magazines, notably a more transient and temporary form of writing, will seldom get more than 20 reviews on Amazon. Magazines, unless digitally available, appear to lack the community they had before. They are simply not talked about anymore.<p>This is not to say that magazines suck (I love niche-based compilations of reportage) or that they are uniquely enjoyable. It's just that they don't seem to fit in the modern life cycle. Boredom, before, was addressed by picking up whatever you had yet to read in your house. With a smartphone, it's always the second or third option.<p>With books, people seem to make a more conscious effort to take out time to read, even turning off their phones to do so. With magazines, I see little evidence of similar drive.<p>Why are magazines dying or dead, while books are alive and aliver?