What will happen to magazines in the future?

Of the approximately 6,000 magazines currently in publication, the most recent year’s worth of issues are lined up in the reading room and open stacks, and anyone can read them freely.

Even if it is an older issue or a magazine that has already been discontinued, if you can confirm that it is in stock by checking the catalog, you can request it at the counter and it will be retrieved from the stacks in the back.

For me, who has always loved magazines and chose the profession of editor, this library is a dream come true.

Being exposed to so many magazines here makes me feel like I don’t need money or women as long as I have magazines…I can let my love for magazines run wild unconditionally, and it feels great.

By the way, because I love magazines, I sometimes wish I had been born 10 years earlier, or even 20 years earlier if possible.

As you know, Japan’s magazine industry has undergone major changes over the past 30 years and is now in a state of significant decline.

The magazine’s heyday was in the mid-1990s.

Subsequently, as the means of gathering information became more diverse with the spread of the Internet, sales began to decline, and since the spread of smartphones in the 2010s, the market shrinkage has been unstoppable.

The magazine sections of convenience stores, which were once the main battleground for major magazines, are now being treated as a burden, and it sometimes even feels like the magazine industry is heading for a black hole in the future.

However, while the general magazine market continues to shrink, some specialist magazines and magazines offering high-quality content have managed to maintain a certain number of readers, and although the situation is tough, it seems there may be a way for them to survive.

What will happen to magazines in the future?

Thinking that this might give me an opportunity to think about these things again, I decided to visit the Tokyo Metropolitan Tama Library.