If you subscribe to PC Magazine, hold onto the January issue: some day it may show up on Antiques Roadshow as a collector’s item. After 27 years of producing what was once the Bible of the microcomputer industry — a rag so dense with advertising that mailmen dreaded the day it showed up in their pouches — PC Magazine is giving up its printed edition and switching entirely to online publication.

First issue of PC Mag

Sadly, this scenario is likely to play out more often as time goes by. With advertising fragmented by the Internet  and cable TV channels, with young readers abandoning print for online publications, and with the cost of paper and distribution increasing too fast to be offset by online revenues, it’s a wonder that only a handful of magazines and newspapers have abandoned dead trees altogether so far.

As an editor whose former newspaper is a shadow of itsself these days, but at least still available in print, I bleed a little every time I read one of these stories. True, I am a wired guy — moreso than most people my age — and I read more news online than I do in print these days. But there’s still something satifsfying about sitting down with a real, honest-to-goodness printed paper or magazine and enjoying it with a cup of coffee at the breakfast table, or in my easy chair at night. I’m sure I could do the same thing with a tablet PC, but I still like the feel of paper. Various studies also show that people read faster in print than online, and retain more of what they’ve read.

But it doesn’t matter, because for many publications, the economics of print just don’t work out any more. Over the years I watched PC Magazine slowly waste away as advertisers and readers dropped out. It cut back publication from twice a month to once, and its final issue was just under 100 pages.

But I also have to note that the magazine’s reason for existence is less compelling than it was. In the 1980s and 1990s, it was a responsible voice of expertise in a technology industry that was exploding with new applications for the new IBM Personal Computer and its clones (IBM actually coined the term “personal computer,” quite accurately). PC’s reviews were throrough and rigorous; the magazine’s labs developed benchmark tests for hardware and software that became industry standards. So influential was the magazine that some hardware vendors rigged their circuit designs to detect when PC Labs tests were running and produce faster results than they ever could in real world applications. Catering to a variety of audiences, the magazine provided programming tips for geeks, sound tech advice for general users, comparison grids for corporate purchasing agents, and yes, a lot of hype about a lot of products that turned out to be vaporware or just plain duds.

Unfortunately, the industry isn’t nearly as exciting as it was 15 or 20 years ago. For most users, PC’s have become near-commodities. In the says when a computer cost $3,000, consumers were likely to look a lot harder before they leaped. Today, $500 buys you a solid computer and $1,000 buys you a great one. Factor inflation into the equation and today’s PC is only a step above an impulse buy. The only people who really care about what’s in them are gaming enthusiasts who need the performance and corporate IT types who have to support and repair them. When Dell, HP, Sony or Lenovo come out with a new model, it’s about as exciting as Whirlpool announcing a new dryer. The real action today is in online software (Facebook, cloud computing applications and illegal file sharing), and in mobile devices like the iPhone and Blackberry. Indeed, read a recent print issue of PC Magazine and you’ll find an inordinate amount of space devloted to to phones, large screen HDTV sets, and digital cameras. So moribund is the PC market that the magazine has taken to reviewing Macs.

Online outlets (Including pcmag.com, the company’s excellent Web site) also offer something print editions can’t — instant access to late-breaking news. Printed magazines have lead times measured in weeks and months.

Enough of this tale of woe. For PC Magazine subscribers who love print, there’s one bright spot — PC Magazine will deliver a print-formatted electronic copy to your e-mailbox every month. So you can read it on your PC,print all of it, or just the handful of articles you want. To misquote the great John Updike, it’s “progress with an escape hatch.” Visit http://go.pcmag.com/subscriberservices/