An icon of the tech publishing industry — PC Magazine — has thrown in the (paper) towel and is discontinuing its printed edition. The computer and digital tech mag will continue publishing, but online only.

Amid a flurry of paper-pub closings and moves by others to all-digital formats, PC Magazine will cease printing a monthly edition with its January, 2009, issue.

Some 600,000 readers currently subscribe to PC Magazine’s print edition. They’ll be offered subscriptions to a new digital edition. The current digital edition — which observers expect will be beefed up considerably in the absence of a print edition — has a mere 15,000 subscribers, who pay (US)$15 per year.

The move to all-digital publishing will save publisher Ziff-Davis a bundle in printing and distribution costs. And they need to make some financial hay. The company filed for bankruptcy protection this past July.

PC Magazine started publishing monthly in 1982, at the dawn of the personal computer (PC) era, and rode the crests and troughs of the PC revolution wave. The magazine published twice monthly from the mid 1980s through the late 1990s. Then, as computers became commoditized and the PC boom subsided, it becan to shrink. PC Magazine fell back to a monthly publication schedule erlier this year, as Ziff-Davis’s fiscal troubles became acute.