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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Why are magazines dying or dead, while books are alive and aliver?
Magazines are mostly short form, cheap content (excluding periodical literary magazines, indie 'zines, etc.) that are usually meant to share the latest news on some subject. Paper is an unnecessary medium with magazines, whose point is to convey contemporary information very quickly, so that people can gossip about it later and then forget about it when the next issue comes out.
In short: It's very difficult to replicate the experience of a book using technology (somehow books have survived the rise of e-readers), but social media optimized magazines down to their most fundamental elements
I no longer buy technical books of any sort. As for other books, eBooks are cheaper and take up less bookshelf space. Notwithstanding, I still have well over 2000 quality books, and that's after culling out of date technical books.
What about books, they might were looking as a half-dead genre in 2009 but there is a lot of enshittification of the Internets happened since there. Seems like a good old ad-free privacy-respecting not-subscription-begging with not-obsoleteable-codec totally-readable-after-100-years paper textbook is a king. Of course you gonna turn off your spam notifications to make yourself able to consume something which is expressed on 100+ pages.
Online 'magazines' -- professional "blogs" with magazine style articles -- can publish an article whenever its done (or even before its done, you can always edit it later). An issue of a magazine comes out every month/quarter etc. and needs content, editing, (usually) advertising placement, layout, printing, distribution etc. to all be done up front and with better/more quality control.
This is really a reason why magazines "lost" to the web, but my point is that books didn't. Books can also survive digitally as ebooks, but an emagazine is (would be) just a less convenient website.
A couple of other thoughts (not reasons or considered arguments):
I feel like buying a magazine is an indulgence. It costs money and has the weight of the resources used to produce it. This means that a magazine feels like an object that should be worth something, which raises the standard for the content. When I did read magazines regularly, I couldn't bring myself to throw them away. A physical book is easier to see as a valuable object in the long term -- keeping them around doesn't (immediately) make you look like a hoarder and they're easier to give away or sell to other people.
I think it depends on what you're looking for. Just was thinking I still have Wired and Fantasy and Science Fiction subscriptions. The latter has, apparently, had some financial scares in the past, but is still here. I was going to say thr Magazines that survive provide "evergreen" content, but Wired has found its niche for largely ephemeral articles. Same with Rolling Stone.
I think I have a problem with your premise. I don't think magazines are collapsing in general, yet many have. Many of the collapsed magazines I'm thinking of made the leap to a web page where costs were lower. Some even survived (Boing Boing comes to mind.) But they're not all gone.