While no one’s writing obits for the most popular titles in automotive print, it’s difficult to fathom how the most popular form of information delivery for the past half-century’s going to fare in the very immediate future.

Folio yesterday put up a jaw-dropping stat (left) on the 07-08 half-year change in circulation among automotive and tech titles. Not good, definitely not good.

We’re not bright enough to know why, or what to do next. We suspect a combination of more and more info posted to the web, mostly free and increasingly sophisticated, combined with a shrinking newstand market. Albertson’s Supermarket, for instance, is closing down most of their remaining stores over the next few weeks.

In the end the answer may be nothing more complicated than a finite resource – time – and a nearly infinite information source – internet – on a collision course that’s competing with print’s limited page count and production cycle.

Are those, like us, who continue rooting for print’s survival hopeless romantics? Or is there a solution, a hybrid, that can blend the best of both in a fresh and utilitarian way? The answer can’t be far off, that much we know.