Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

House & Garden, a magazine that has been around for more than a century, is going out of business; its December issue will be its last. Founded in 1901, House & Garden’s parent company, Condé Nast Publications, finally decided to pull the plug after the recent departure of the magazine’s publisher (of course, the fact that it wasn’t profitable probably also had something to do with it).

“The magazine had monthly paid circulation of nearly 1 million and about 800 advertising pages through the first 11 months of the year,” writes the New York Times. “Better numbers than many of its competitors. But Condé Nast, a privately held company with more than two dozen magazines, is known in the industry for having high operating costs.”

And while a lot of House & Garden’s troubles can be traced to things like the housing slump and the competition among other “shelter” magazines (the category that House & Garden fits into), another factor in the magazine’s downfall is our new digital, always-online culture.

Per the Times:

The closing of House & Garden “is probably symptomatic of what we might see more of in the magazine industry,” said Charlie Rutman, chief executive for the North American operations of MPG, a media agency owned by Havas. “In today’s hyperspeed ‘give me what I want when I want it’ world, the idea of waiting 30 days to get my information is out of sync.”

Thus House & Garden now becomes the latest in a number of high profile magazines to have bit the dust in the past couple of years: ElleGirl, Jane, Business 2.0, Teen People and Life (not to mention that Portfolio is not doing so hot either). Meanwhile, more and more people are consuming content online, choosing to subscribe to RSS feeds instead of magazines.