EEVblog Electronics Community Forum
General => General Technical Chat => Topic started by: Specmaster on December 17, 2017, 06:00:43 pm
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How are we going to be able to recruit new comers into becoming electronic engineers when there are no magazines available (at least to my knowledge) there doesn't seem to be any. Years ago I can remember Practical Electronics as one such magazine.
I have been scouring the magazine racks in the largest newsagent in my City and drew a complete blank, plenty for modelling, boating, biking, Arduino, Raspberry Pie etc but zero in straight forward pure electronics.
Does anyone know of anything thats is available here in the UK and are my findings typical in other countries?
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Here we have Nuts and Volts, and Servo, but they're hard to find unless you go to a very large book store. You really need to subscribe if you have any interest. I think Circuit Cellar is still around also.
This one seems to still exist:
http://www.epemag.com/ (http://www.epemag.com/)
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The internet happened. Traditional newspapers and magazines all have a hard time.
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There are three still available in the UK...
EPE - A fusion of what used to be Practical Electronic and Everyday Electronics - it seems to take a lot of its projects from its Australian counterpart these days.
http://www.epemag.com/ (http://www.epemag.com/)
Elektor - much as it always was, based in the Netherlands
https://www.elektor.com/magazines/single-issues-print (https://www.elektor.com/magazines/single-issues-print)
Practical Wireless - Pretty much unchanged by the ravages of time!
If you want a bit of Nostalgia, you can find many of the back issues, together with titles like ETI at.. http://www.americanradiohistory.com/ (http://www.americanradiohistory.com/)
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And here in Australia we have Silicon Chip (which just celebrated its 30's anniversary) and the newcomer Diyode.
Having two newsagent magazines brings us back to the 1970s - 1990s era levels.
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In Germany, there are Funkamateur and Elektor
In Uruguay all Electronics Magazines are dead.
The beloved "Corriente Alterna" was published from 1926 up to the 80s :'(
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Not long ago, Elektor had a free offer which was discussed here, and I took them up on it, and thought it was pretty good.
But when the three month trial subscription ended, I didn't renew it because it was too expensive.
I thought that if they didn't print the magazine, and simply had PDFs, and it was cheaper, I likely would have subscribed.
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Oh yes, likewise. That was a good free offer (is there any other kind? :)), it gave full access to all of the back issue PDFs too.
It was a one day offer on Boxing Day as I remember, probably worth keeping an eye out this year!
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Prices? $10-12 per issue here for EPE or Elektor, full of ads.
Had a subscription to Silicon Chip Magazine, loved it but extra international shipping. Spilt milk on an issue eatin' breakfast, and found out I would have to pay TWICE for the same content if I wanted the electronic version of the same issue. Couldn't buy A4-sized binders. Adobe Flash on-line viewing only; can't read on an airplane. It was just too much hassle, sorry Leo.
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The internet happened. Traditional newspapers and magazines all have a hard time.
The internet did happen, but all too often we hear the blame for failing business passing onto the internet. Surely any good business embraces the internet, or takes it on and really don't think that sticking prices up to the point where people decide enough is enough and walk away from buying magazines. These days in the UK it is possible to pick some newspapers for free in supermarkets because the advertisers cover the cost. Lets face it from what I remember of the electronics magazines, almost half of the content was adverts and while the adverts are useful, I for one object to paying a royally handsome fee for adverts to be almost 50% of the content, plus year on year the pages got less.
I really cannot see how these days with modern computers and the printing is contracted out to printers who are running their presses 24/7 that cost to the consumer should be rising for minimalist real content.
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There are three still available in the UK...
EPE - A fusion of what used to be Practical Electronic and Everyday Electronics - it seems to take a lot of its projects from its Australian counterpart these days.
http://www.epemag.com/ (http://www.epemag.com/)
Elektor - much as it always was, based in the Netherlands
https://www.elektor.com/magazines/single-issues-print (https://www.elektor.com/magazines/single-issues-print)
Practical Wireless - Pretty much unchanged by the ravages of time!
If you want a bit of Nostalgia, you can find many of the back issues, together with titles like ETI at.. http://www.americanradiohistory.com/ (http://www.americanradiohistory.com/)
Having now been to these sites, I'm surprised at the cost of the subscriptions, especially for PDFs that you have to download (if you can) and printout, its stupidly high, given that there are now no typesetters etc that they used to have to pay for before, no printing presses because its just a PDF file, something that they have to produce or something very similar to be emailed to printer if it was a printed mag anyway and to boot they are asking for a minimum of 6 months subscription, why not have a non printable version that is browsable on line that a customer could have look through to see if they were happy with the content of the mag.
With a printed copy, this you could do in a newsagents to help make up your mind, many magazines are impulse purchases, coloured by an article within the magazine itself.
In real terms I would have thought that the cost of producing an online magazine should be far lower and need far less staff, smaller premises etc, in other words the overheads should be dramatically reduced but the costs of a years subscription does not seem to reflect that at all.
I think I'll look out to see if they have any special deals / offers on as said in your later post before committing to a subscription.
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Newcomer
https://diyodemag.com/ (https://diyodemag.com/)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QX9XlaYwU5k (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QX9XlaYwU5k)
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I think the decline started well before the internet. short wave magazine and radio constructor are two titles I can think of that vanished well before the advent of the internet. From a publishing point of view who's going to buy that crap anyway, it's all down to sales. It's a very small minority market and getting smaller, the same probably applies to companies like Maplin who used to sell to a small minority market and who are trying to change things around to attract more customers. Edit: Missed Daves post about DIYODE magazine, good luck guys :-+
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I liked the old Wireless World mag, especially the discussion in the "letters" section.
I particularly remember, one occasion when letters discussing an article by Ivor Katt were penned by folk adopting silly nom-de- plumes, such as:-
Ouida Dogg & Weaver-Mowse.
Very erudite people, but hilarious with it.
Of course, forums ( fora?) like this one have taken the place of the old "letters" section, but with virtually instant access.
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[/quote]
With instant access you forgo the erudition.
[/quote]
And the politeness and the ability to have a decent discussion.
Although in its day there were some heated exchanges on the “letters to the editor “ section, no profane insults or ad hominem attacks would be allowed by the magazine editor.
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The internet happened. Traditional newspapers and magazines all have a hard time.
Seriously. He asked this question on an internet forum? REALLY?
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The internet happened. Traditional newspapers and magazines all have a hard time.
Seriously. He asked this question on an internet forum? REALLY?
No he didn't ask that question, he made that statement to a question I posed regarding magazines. Its easier to read something on paper then it is on a screen, you can read it anywhere without the sun washing out the screen, battery going flat or losing internet connection and you can build up a library and can even read then in the dunny or as many do, in the bath etc.
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The internet did happen, but all too often we hear the blame for failing business passing onto the internet. Surely any good business embraces the internet, or takes it on and really don't think that sticking prices up to the point where people decide enough is enough and walk away from buying magazines. These days in the UK it is possible to pick some newspapers for free in supermarkets because the advertisers cover the cost. Lets face it from what I remember of the electronics magazines, almost half of the content was adverts and while the adverts are useful, I for one object to paying a royally handsome fee for adverts to be almost 50% of the content, plus year on year the pages got less.
I really cannot see how these days with modern computers and the printing is contracted out to printers who are running their presses 24/7 that cost to the consumer should be rising for minimalist real content.
Sure, but you can't deny that traditional magazines and newspapers have had a rough time all across the board, in nations all over the globe, ranging from small time outfits to huge multibillion companies. That indicates that there has been a real change, rather than a few people who failed and blamed the internet.
Of course, there are new opportunities to be had, but often the problem is that the one with an already existing and now obsolete infrastructure is disadvantaged compared to a new outfit.
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The internet did happen, but all too often we hear the blame for failing business passing onto the internet. Surely any good business embraces the internet, or takes it on and really don't think that sticking prices up to the point where people decide enough is enough and walk away from buying magazines. These days in the UK it is possible to pick some newspapers for free in supermarkets because the advertisers cover the cost. Lets face it from what I remember of the electronics magazines, almost half of the content was adverts and while the adverts are useful, I for one object to paying a royally handsome fee for adverts to be almost 50% of the content, plus year on year the pages got less.
I really cannot see how these days with modern computers and the printing is contracted out to printers who are running their presses 24/7 that cost to the consumer should be rising for minimalist real content.
Sure, but you can't deny that traditional magazines and newspapers have had a rough time all across the board, in nations all over the globe, ranging from small time outfits to huge multibillion companies. That indicates that there has been a real change, rather than a few people who failed and blamed the internet.
Of course, there are new opportunities to be had, but often the problem is that the one with an already existing and now obsolete infrastructure is disadvantaged compared to a new outfit.
Hence "embrace" the Internet, adapt the business model to incorporate the Internet as part of the core operations and then they run the real risk of becoming truly international. The printing and distribution headaches become a thing of the past.
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Hence "embrace" the Internet, adapt the business model to incorporate the Internet as part of the core operations and then they run the real risk of becoming truly international. The printing and distribution headaches become a thing of the past.
Sure, but as we've already established, it's often easier to start from scratch than it is to reconstruct your existing business, with all sorts of investments and liabilities attached.
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Hence "embrace" the Internet, adapt the business model to incorporate the Internet as part of the core operations and then they run the real risk of becoming truly international. The printing and distribution headaches become a thing of the past.
Sure, but as we've already established, it's often easier to start from scratch than it is to reconstruct your existing business, with all sorts of investments and liabilities attached.
I don't see how difficult it is to do, sell the printing side as company in its own right. Distribution was via wholesalers the rest of the business remains the same BUT instead of having it printed, you turn it into a pdf, one computer is all is required to do that and it gets emailed via automated system to subscribers.
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I don't see how difficult it is to do, sell the printing side as company in its own right. Distribution was via wholesalers the rest of the business remains the same BUT instead of having it printed, you turn it into a pdf, one computer is all is required to do that and it gets emailed via automated system to subscribers.
Considering how many magazines and publishers went out of business, it's apparently not that easy. Who's going to buy a printing press location without customers and in a steadily declining market? Printers all over the world are struggling to survive. Even if you do sell it, it's probably going to fetch a fairly measly amount of money. That means writing off a lot of capital, which could lead to bankruptcy in itself, especially if there's loans against the property. That's the kind of strings attached I was referring to before. Traditional companies have made investments and committed to various things and you can't just back out and forget about it without taking a financial hit. That's often not feasible for an already struggling company.
Selling digital editions just like you used to sell them physically isn't going to work either. A lot of companies tried and failed. The internet provides news for free and does it quicker than any newspaper ever could. Why would people pay? Only now the public is starting to realize that the fast and quick news of the internet doesn't always have the same quality newspapers used to have, but it's taken a while.
It's fairly typical, though. Again and again you see the same thing happening in declining industries. It's not always an advantage to be a big player in a dying market.
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BUT instead of having it printed, you turn it into a pdf, one computer is all is required to do that and it gets emailed via automated system to subscribers.
And the pdf copy gets put on bit torrent, or passed to friends, etc.
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It's fairly typical, though. Again and again you see the same thing happening in declining industries. It's not always an advantage to be a big player in a dying market.
How very true that is.
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BUT instead of having it printed, you turn it into a pdf, one computer is all is required to do that and it gets emailed via automated system to subscribers.
And the pdf copy gets put on bit torrent, or passed to friends, etc.
How do other magazines get around this then, there are loads of the glossy monthlies now distributed electronically as per this site,
https://gb.zinio.com/ so there has to be a suitable solution.
I have been inside many companies where they buy a single copy of a magazine and then it goes onto a circulation list and works its way throughout the company being passed on from person to person, how does that differ from a PDF being passed on, which in my experience tends to happen more the expensive ones. People like to collect sets of the magazines and then pop them into binders and use them as reference books in the future etc.
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IMO it started already end of the 90s, I was an Elektor member and saw the analog well described circuits disappear towards medium sized microprocessor products where the hobbieist could only buy the board and microcontroller ready programmed in order to build it. The description of some more complex projects that needed 10 pages and 5 pages for the software were only two pages and a few snippets of code making it fairly useless for reproduction or actually understanding how the programmer solved some issues.
What actually could work are projects described into detail about the design details, why some components were choosen over others, the functionality of the hardware but also the software with full codelisting in c with comments and describing the algorithms. So in short they should make open source software and hardware and put the repository and documentation online.
That is how you would sell your magazine but lets face it a magazine is made by a couple of persons while in the world already hundreds of individuals are putting their creations online to share with others.
While the only source of information once was a monthly magazine you now have so many bloggers, vloggers programmers and engineers contributing that you do not even have time to read and view what is created each and every day.
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IMO it started already end of the 90s, I was an Elektor member and saw the analog well described circuits disappear towards medium sized microprocessor products where the hobbieist could only buy the board and microcontroller ready programmed in order to build it. The description of some more complex projects that needed 10 pages and 5 pages for the software were only two pages and a few snippets of code making it fairly useless for reproduction or actually understanding how the programmer solved some issues.
What actually could work are projects described into detail about the design details, why some components were choosen over others, the functionality of the hardware but also the software with full codelisting in c with comments and describing the algorithms. So in short they should make open source software and hardware and put the repository and documentation online.
That is how you would sell your magazine but lets face it a magazine is made by a couple of persons while in the world already hundreds of individuals are putting their creations online to share with others.
While the only source of information once was a monthly magazine you now have so many bloggers, vloggers programmers and engineers contributing that you do not even have time to read and view what is created each and every day.
I agree with your comments almost 100%, yes there is lots of info on the net in general but knowing where to look for it is a full time job in itself. If this info was pulled together into an online magazine along with the type of thing you describe and also some very basic items aimed at being educational, it could inspire many people into getting into electronics and may become the next generation of inventors to take us forwards.
That was my original point in as much as there seemed to be nothing to do that out there currently. It was straight into microcontrollers from nothing, I couldn't see how that was going to be able to produce the next level of electronic building blocks but a generation of coders and assemblers.
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The internet is what happened to them. I've been a subscriber to Nuts & Volts for nearly 30 years now, and I got Popular Electronics and Radio Electronics/Electronics Now up until their demise. I'm planning to let my Nuts & Volts subscription lapse this time around though because I find myself spending less and less time with each new issue which seem to get thinner and thinner, aimed at stuff I don't care about. It's been years since I built a project out of a modern magazine, these days if I build something from an existing plan it's something I found online. It sucks in a way, and I have a lot of nostalgia about the magazines and I'll be keeping my collection but I can't justify continuing to get them forever. I've realized for the past few years it's been a charity case, continuing to subscribe in order to support the magazine.
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One thing about magazines, is that the editors were there to sort out the nonsense from the technically correct material.
The Internet, on the other hand is brimming over with absolute duck poo, & the unfortunate beginner is left to his/her own devices when trying to navigate through it.
Some of the strange circuits presented by beginners on this forum, accompanied by a plaintive
"Why doesn't it work?" come from sites that seem to aggregate schematics from all over, with no technical oversight at all.
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The internet is what happened to them. I've been a subscriber to Nuts & Volts for nearly 30 years now, and I got Popular Electronics and Radio Electronics/Electronics Now up until their demise. I'm planning to let my Nuts & Volts subscription lapse this time around though because I find myself spending less and less time with each new issue which seem to get thinner and thinner, aimed at stuff I don't care about. It's been years since I built a project out of a modern magazine, these days if I build something from an existing plan it's something I found online. It sucks in a way, and I have a lot of nostalgia about the magazines and I'll be keeping my collection but I can't justify continuing to get them forever. I've realized for the past few years it's been a charity case, continuing to subscribe in order to support the magazine.
I think you have hit on a couple of issues here thinner and thinner, aimed at stuff I don't care about which may be typical of the reasons why some have died away, less and less content, is something I have noticed in a lot of things, even news papers these days sometimes seem to struggle to find content. The other point raised is that the content that was there was something that failed to grasp your interest.
You said that the past few years its been a charity case, but I expect that if the content had not dwindled away and some of the content was relevant and of interest to you, that you'd still be happy to subscribe unless it become prohibitively expensive, is that correct? If it gone over to being online and was only readable say though an app that was encoded which is what I suspect zino.com do, then it should be possible to keep the cost down to a reasonable level, you'd be happy?
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One thing about magazines, is that the editors were there to sort out the nonsense from the technically correct material.
The Internet, on the other hand is brimming over with absolute duck poo, & the unfortunate beginner is left to his/her own devices when trying to navigate through it.
Some of the strange circuits presented by beginners on this forum, accompanied by a plaintive
"Why doesn't it work?" come from sites that seem to aggregate schematics from all over, with no technical oversight at all.
Very true point and if the magazine did publish something was wrong, it was addressed in the next issue whereas if you choose to have ago at making from a misguided website / blog (Youtube is awash with these) and you go and purchase all the BOM to make this object and it doesn't work as expected, in most cases you are left to your own devices, there is next to or zero support from the content provider.
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Another veteran here, that subscribed to US, British and Australian magazines from about 1975 to 2010..........
I fully agree with all the comments above.
Between 1975 and 1987 I lived in Mexico, and getting a US subscription would cost me three times as much, but it was worth every single penny.
The only other thing that I will add, is that even the ads would be very informative. I would browse thru the early, single-page ads from Jameco, Digikey and others, and compare component prices and check the latest components: "BiFet opamps! 1k RAM! 600 volt, 35 amp Triac!".
I would also salivate at the kits, which would describe in tantalizing detail the circuit features such as: "....the preamp stage employs the latest Texas Instruments low-noise, high slew rate opamps, low noise, 1% metal film resistors, and Sprague film capacitors. The optional power supply employs a low hum toroid transformer, and computer-grade electrolytic capacitors."
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High-end grocery store here has 0 electronics magazines on the shelf, but I counted 12 magazines featuring guns and rifles on the cover. There's a bias against electronics magazines for stores to display them.
Magazine projects got silly - either bonehead simple or stupid complicated/expensive to build.
Some don't give the source-code used in the MCU. Hear that Silicon Chip?
The maker-movement and associated magazines are doing better because their projects are more relevant, open-source, and not so old school.
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I think you have hit on a couple of issues here thinner and thinner, aimed at stuff I don't care about which may be typical of the reasons why some have died away, less and less content, is something I have noticed in a lot of things, even news papers these days sometimes seem to struggle to find content. The other point raised is that the content that was there was something that failed to grasp your interest.
You said that the past few years its been a charity case, but I expect that if the content had not dwindled away and some of the content was relevant and of interest to you, that you'd still be happy to subscribe unless it become prohibitively expensive, is that correct? If it gone over to being online and was only readable say though an app that was encoded which is what I suspect zino.com do, then it should be possible to keep the cost down to a reasonable level, you'd be happy?
Yes, far too many of the projects in recent years have started with an Arduino or Raspberry Pi and that's precisely the sort of stuff the internet is full of, I don't need a magazine for that. I want unique projects, electronic gadgets built from scratch, quality articles that cover various aspects of electrical and electronics engineering, interesting new parts, retro stuff, etc. There is some of that remaining but not enough to be worth continuing to subscribe.
I will *not* pay for a digital subscription that is locked to a specific app though, that is precisely why I dumped Everyday Practical Electronics and never looked back. They went from ordinary unlocked PDF's to the PocketMags app which despite jumping through hoops I was never able to get it to work at all on anything I had so I gave up. I abandoned my subscription right there and was then able to eventually find most of the issues I had already paid in advance for on torrent sites. Eventually I think they dumped Pocketmags and went back to pdf but I was so irked by the experience that I never subscribed again. It's too bad really because it was a great magazine though a bit overpriced. Even the online digital version was substantially more expensive than a physical subscription to Nuts & Volts.
More recently I found a legitimate site that has digitized issues of all sorts of old magazines, lately I've been reading Radio Electronics back all the way to the 1950s. Since discovering that I have enough reading material to keep me occupied for a long time. Every once in a while I've built a project from some decades old magazine article and that's always fun.
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Yes, far too many of the projects in recent years have started with an Arduino or Raspberry Pi and that's precisely the sort of stuff the internet is full of, I don't need a magazine for that. I want unique projects, electronic gadgets built from scratch, quality articles that cover various aspects of electrical and electronics engineering, interesting new parts, retro stuff, etc. There is some of that remaining but not enough to be worth continuing to subscribe.
I will *not* pay for a digital subscription that is locked to a specific app though, that is precisely why I dumped Everyday Practical Electronics and never looked back. They went from ordinary unlocked PDF's to the PocketMags app which despite jumping through hoops I was never able to get it to work at all on anything I had so I gave up. I abandoned my subscription right there and was then able to eventually find most of the issues I had already paid in advance for on torrent sites. Eventually I think they dumped Pocketmags and went back to pdf but I was so irked by the experience that I never subscribed again. It's too bad really because it was a great magazine though a bit overpriced. Even the online digital version was substantially more expensive than a physical subscription to Nuts & Volts.
More recently I found a legitimate site that has digitized issues of all sorts of old magazines, lately I've been reading Radio Electronics back all the way to the 1950s. Since discovering that I have enough reading material to keep me occupied for a long time. Every once in a while I've built a project from some decades old magazine article and that's always fun.
Exactly, not everyone and his dog wants to get involved with Arduino's or Raspberry Pi's, maybe at a later stage / date but right now I'm happy with discrete parts in my electronics thank you very much.
Costs on a PDF version should be considerably lower than a printed version in full colour, I fail to see how they think they can justify the costs??
Would you mind sharing the site address for those old digitised issues please?
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I have nothing against Arduinos and RPis but the internet is saturated with projects involving connecting various modules to those, I don't need a magazine for that. Also the Q&A section frequently posts answers that are not informative or occasionally downright wrong. Overall it just seems the quality has fallen noticeably, certainly compared to the old stuff.
Sure, I had to find it, the bookmark is on my laptop at home.
http://www.americanradiohistory.com/Radio_Electronics%20_Master_Page.htm (http://www.americanradiohistory.com/Radio_Electronics%20_Master_Page.htm)
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I've downloaded quite a few from the Internet Archive:
http://archive.org/search.php?query=collection%3Aradioelectronicsmagazine (http://archive.org/search.php?query=collection%3Aradioelectronicsmagazine)
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I think the decline started well before the internet.
I agree. I cancelled my subscription to Elektor early in the 90's because it got boring. They had a 'high end' audio amplifier twice a year and lots of model railroad stuff. Also no sourcecode for their microcontroller projects which took all the fun out of building any of their microcontroller based projects yourself and modifying it to your own needs (isn't that what an electronics hobby is all about?).
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Starting probably as early as the 1960s and steadily accelerating through the 1980s and 1990s and continuing today, businesses switched from "providing goods and services" to "focusing on the bottom-line" (that is, cost versus profit).
For electronics publications, they were once content to fill a niche of hobbyists trying to learn something new, clever, or otherwise just interesting. But expert writers and editors are not cheap, so when the focus changed to the bottom-line, the most obvious thing (to business-minded managers) was to eliminate the most expensive parts of the business which were the experts. The magazines drained momentum for a few more decades but once the Internet took off, the articles written by these average-smart experts were at best average compared to the aggregated tidbits of real experts writing content online.
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Starting probably as early as the 1960s and steadily accelerating through the 1980s and 1990s and continuing today, businesses switched from "providing goods and services" to "focusing on the bottom-line" (that is, cost versus profit).
For electronics publications, they were once content to fill a niche of hobbyists trying to learn something new, clever, or otherwise just interesting. But expert writers and editors are not cheap, so when the focus changed to the bottom-line, the most obvious thing (to business-minded managers) was to eliminate the most expensive parts of the business which were the experts. The magazines drained momentum for a few more decades but once the Internet took off, the articles written by these average-smart experts were at best average compared to the aggregated tidbits of real experts writing content online.
I think the notion that the bottom line wasn't the main target before is a misconception.
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The redeeming grace of an electronics magazine was that the articles were reviewed at least by one editor, who corrected not only glaring technical errors, but also grammatical mistakes.
If errors were printed, there would be a published correction in the next issue, and/or some letters to the editor pointing out the error.
With the web, mistakes go unchecked.
I'm sure that we posters in this and other fora have seen multiple times a variation of the following post: Help, my XYZ-5 circuit is not working. Followed by a schematic full of basic mistakes.
I sometimes feel pity because many are from developing countries where finding electronic components is both expensive and a real chore.
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Although in its day there were some heated exchanges on the “letters to the editor “ section, no profane insults or ad hominem attacks would be allowed by the magazine editor.
It was a more civilised age!
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I was a more civilised age!
You mean you were younger when you read them Dave ? :o ;)
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The internet is what happened to them.
Well, yes, but the decline started somewhat before the internet.
The web happened in 1995, and you could argue that a magazine like Electronics Australia (the longest running electronics magazine in the world) started it's decline in the late 80's.
I put a lot of the blame on the home computer revolution.
What did curious kids do in the 60's and especially the 70's? There were no computers or other gadget filled worlds to catch their attention, so hobby electronics was an obvious avenue to pursue.
But once computers came along, the curious kids got caught up in those and diverted their attention away. Hobby electronics became more obscure.
Heck, even I mostly gave up electronics as a hobby and caught caught up in computers and programming in the 90's.
Then the cheap consumer gadgets came along and it was all over red rover.
I and countless others basically called the end to hobby electronics in the late 90's and 2000's.
Then along came the maker revolution that surprised all the old hobbyists, and hobby electronics became cool again.
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I think the decline started well before the internet.
I agree. I cancelled my subscription to Elektor early in the 90's because it got boring. They had a 'high end' audio amplifier twice a year and lots of model railroad stuff. Also no sourcecode for their microcontroller projects which took all the fun out of building any of their microcontroller based projects yourself and modifying it to your own needs (isn't that what an electronics hobby is all about?).
Actually, the most interesting bit of Elektor these days is the 'Labs' Section. That's where the projects under development are. You can download files from there if you just register for a basic free account...
https://www.elektormagazine.com/labs (https://www.elektormagazine.com/labs)
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I was doing some research into the Australian AWA radiosondes used over VIC , Victoria in the 1960's.
seeking the uniquely Australian electronic circuits used and any Australian photos.
but a lack of information on line, as this is before the internet, had me looking for
Electronics Australia magazine archives from 1965 to about 1985. but there is non on the internet. :'(
other then private collections. or ebay my father had a EA magazine collection at the time.
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I was doing some research into the Australian AWA radiosondes used over VIC , Victoria in the 1960's.
seeking the uniquely Australian electronic circuits used and any Australian photos.
but a lack of information on line, as this is before the internet, had me looking for
Electronics Australia magazine archives from 1965 to about 1985. but there is non on the internet. :'(
other then private collections. or ebay my father had a EA magazine collection at the time.
Hi, you will find January 1967 and March 1969 in this link
http://www.americanradiohistory.com/Elecronics_Australia.htm (http://www.americanradiohistory.com/Elecronics_Australia.htm)
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The internet is what happened to them.
I put a lot of the blame on the home computer revolution.
I believe you are absolutely correct.
In the US, the best American Electronics magazine in the 70s and early 80s was Popular Electronics. At one point they had a circulation close to 450K.
But then they had the brilliant idea that they should be involved with the new personal computers, and changed the name to Computers & Electronics.
The rest evolved exactly as you have accurately described.
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I was doing some research into the Australian AWA radiosondes used over VIC , Victoria in the 1960's.
seeking the uniquely Australian electronic circuits used and any Australian photos.
but a lack of information on line, as this is before the internet, had me looking for
Electronics Australia magazine archives from 1965 to about 1985. but there is non on the internet. :'(
other then private collections. or ebay my father had a EA magazine collection at the time.
Hi, you will find January 1967 and March 1969 in this link
http://www.americanradiohistory.com/Elecronics_Australia.htm (http://www.americanradiohistory.com/Elecronics_Australia.htm)
Page 12 of the January 1967 has an interesting ad.
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The internet is what happened to them.
I put a lot of the blame on the home computer revolution.
I believe you are absolutely correct.
In the US, the best American Electronics magazine in the 70s and early 80s was Popular Electronics. At one point they had a circulation close to 450K.
But then they had the brilliant idea that they should be involved with the new personal computers, and changed the name to Computers & Electronics.
The rest evolved exactly as you have accurately described.
There was some crossover though. In the early 90s I built an interface card (from a magazine article) to plug into my PC/XT and wrote programs in BASIC to control all sorts of stuff. I had many hours of fun with that, of course now an AVR or PIC would be more capable but microcontrollers weren't really a thing back then. I mean they were around but most required expensive programming hardware and specialized software.
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It is not just electronics magazines that have gone, there used to be several computer magazines which had good technical articles such as Byte, Dr Dobb's Journal and PCW in its early days.
There was another thread discussing this recently - I remember posting a link on it for the issue of Byte which included a version of SPICE for a Commodore 64!
Found it with a bit of searching:
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/beginners/uk-electronics-mag/ (https://www.eevblog.com/forum/beginners/uk-electronics-mag/)
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Computers became boring commodities, which I suppose is the case for some aspects of electronics as well. There are countless websites out there that review the latest computer hardware, I wouldn't subscribe to a magazine for it. I don't think there's nearly as much tinkering going on with PCs anymore, the vast majority of people just buy one and use it until it breaks and then buy a new one. There are really only two mainstream platforms anymore, Windows and Mac.
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Computers became boring commodities, which I suppose is the case for some aspects of electronics as well. There are countless websites out there that review the latest computer hardware, I wouldn't subscribe to a magazine for it. I don't think there's nearly as much tinkering going on with PCs anymore, the vast majority of people just buy one and use it until it breaks and then buy a new one. There are really only two mainstream platforms anymore, Windows and Mac.
some of us still tinker for fun.
Of all the electronic components and devices that I have in my home lab. less the 10% will ever become completed & working projects. the big unknown for my hobby is which electronic components and which devices become completed projects. such is hobby electronics.
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For someone into analog stuff Linear Audio might be worth reading
https://linearaudio.net/
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It's clear from some comments that some people have no idea how print magazines work economically or indeed, what processes are necessary to get a magazine to press, whether 'getting to press' involves a physical printing press or getting to a published PDF file.
For the people who think that a magazine would have a printing operation to sell off if they went on-line only: no. Magazines are pretty much exclusively printed by outside contracted printers. Even the biggest publishers can't afford to keep a print shop that can print 10k, 100k, or 1 million print run magazines and keep it busy all the time. Magazines aren't sent out in dribs and drabs to the shops and subscribers throughout the month, they all turn up on publication day. So, no lucrative print plant to be sold.
Also some people seem to think that the origination costs magically disappear if you go to a PDF only version of a magazine. Again. no. The copy still needs editting, pages still need laying out, illustrations still need originating - in fact all the things that would be done to originate a print edition still need doing.
Elektor helpfully have a media kit, with advertising prices and circulation figures online - so let's use them for a little exercise in running the numbers. They have three other language editions which will require as much effort to put together as the English one, even if they have the same basic content (I know this from real practical experience), so I'm just going to take the English language edition as an example.
The English language printed version of Elektor has a circulation of 15,000 copies. There are 6 issues a year with a cover price of £9.95. That probably translates into a print run of 20,000 copies. The income from distribution will be about 50% of the cover price (the distributor and newsagents need to take their cut).
So that gives us an income from distribution of about £75,000 per issue.
Printing costs on a 100,000 run used to be about 1p a page around 2000 and I have not kept up with rates. Let's assume that standard inflation applies and call it 1.6p a page. Let's be generous and assume that Elektor can get a similar rate for their 20,000 run. The September/October 2017 issue of elektor had 132 pages, so it will have cost at least £42,240 to print.
Ad rates are 3000 euro/full page (1200 1/4 page). In the September/October 2017 issue there were 4 1/4 pages of advertising. That's 13,200 euros from advertising, £11,650.
So our total income, per issue is, £86,650 or £519,900 per year. The net income, from which they have to fund editoral staff, freelance writers, an office to work from, and all the usual overheads is £44,410 an issue or £266,460 per year.
Anybody with some commercial experience will quickly realize that does not translate into plush offices or high salaries for an extensive staff. The editorial team I last worked on generated about the same number of pages per issue as Elektor, but twice as often, and ran to 10 full-time editorial staff (strictly editorial, this was part of a large magazine publishers with ad sales teams, accounts, management, publishers and all the rest of the support functions on top of those 10) plus freelancers as well.
Now, back when I was in the magazine business for a living we used to reckon that the advertising paid for printing and physical distribution costs, and the cover price (after distributors and newsagents cut) paid for editorial and any profit. That is clearly not true nowadays if Elektor can only drum up 4 1/4 pages of advertising in an issue.
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I haven't subscribed to an electronic mag for many years, I think the last one I subscribed to was Byte Magazine.
The other hobby I have is model railroading, which I'm in the process of building a layout now. I do subscribe to a magazine "Model Railroader" but when the subscription ends I'm not going to renew it. There are very good free online "magazines" and forums and You Tube ... so much is out there on the internets that there is really nothing I can't find anymore. Another hobby magazine dies due to the internets. :P
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Oh yes, likewise. That was a good free offer (is there any other kind? :)), it gave full access to all of the back issue PDFs too.
It was a one day offer on Boxing Day as I remember, probably worth keeping an eye out this year!
Elektor are offering the same Boxing Day free 3 month trial... If you're quick. https://www.eevblog.com/forum/buysellwanted/free-3-months-elektor-magazine-trial-membership-expires-dec-26-2017-(000-cet-)/ (https://www.eevblog.com/forum/buysellwanted/free-3-months-elektor-magazine-trial-membership-expires-dec-26-2017-(000-cet-)/)
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Cerebus, what about the revenue from the PCB and kit service, I don't see that in your numbers.
Elektor's markup seems high on PC boards, and then they go out of stock a year later >:(
Silicon Chip magazine seems to do better with Altronics (http://www.altronics.com.au/kits-toys/audio-projects-kits/?pg=16) having PC boards and parts kits, heatsinks all that included which is very nice.
It's really nice to not have to spend a ton of time putting something together, don't we all have dozens of unfinished projects?
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I can't help it but I still feel that magazines whether on line or in print are very expensive, especially when all things considered with the number of adverts in them accounting for almost 40% of the contents and half the time the remaining part full of things that are not engaging or interesting enough to continue to hang onto their existing subscribers let alone attract new ones.
In that context they are just as guilty of their own demise as just as many of the large chain stores are and I'm sick of hearing them use the reason for their demise being the internet. Yes the internet happened, but the real culprits for the chain stores is the manufacturers getting greedy and selling to the internet sellers at the same prices as they did to the chain stores. Chain stores had large warehouses and held large stocks, most had their own transport to supply their shops and also do customer deliveries. Internet sellers buy direct from the manufacturers, many hold no stocks and simply place the order direct to the factory and also get the factory to deliver to the end customers, you and I.
The same cannot be said for magazines however, yes the internet does exist and there is a lot of information on it as well, much of it just pure rubbish as almost anybody can put information onto forums such as this one, and we often get things wrong. Search engines search around for keywords users input and they can and do pull information directly out of such forums I know, I have used a search engine and have come across info that I contributed to this forum. Who actually checks that what we say is factually correct, or that the said project schematic or whatever actually works etc? Nobody thats who, our posts are not vetted for accuracy or correctness prior to publishing them on the net. Magazines are supposed to do that by the editing team.
By embracing the internet, switching to online, cheaper subscriptions, which should be possible as there are NO printing, distribution costs and no profit cuts to be taken by wholesalers or newsagents means that straight away that portion of the savings could be passed on to the consumer. That alone might encourage existing subscribers to continue and attract more subscribers. More subscribers, bigger advertisers revenue as a result, better content for the consumer would also encourage more readers to subscribe, bigger circulation would attract more advertisers because they would be reaching more potential buyers. It is a cost induced thing, if it was free and had millions of subscribers worldwide downloading the publications the advertisers would be prepared to pay more because of the exposure that they get to the market. Now I'm not for a single minute suggesting that they should be free now but given time with the right leadership and drive to continue to engage in a meaningful way with subscribers I do believe that at some point in the future they could be and the magazines would have the right staff and offices to continue the process.
Do we pay each time we use a search engines or we use and of the apps that that are available on line from the likes of Google, word processing etc are all free.
Advertisers pay for it all and google as a result gets richer and richer and have very nice plush offices so the model has in theory been proven already.
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Cerebus, what about the revenue from the PCB and kit service, I don't see that in your numbers.
C'mon, it's clearly a back-of-the-envelope exercise, not a full management accounts report. ::)
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Cerebus, what about the revenue from the PCB and kit service, I don't see that in your numbers.
C'mon, it's clearly a back-of-the-envelope exercise, not a full management accounts report. ::)
Your last napkin was quite detailed ;)
I was wondering how much extra revenue might be generated by the kit/pcb service. I couldn't guess how many readers actually buy/build the (service) projects.
Did EPE sack their technical staff and now simply purchases articles from SC magazine?
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I don't think that anyone took your valid attempt at justification of the cost and demise of the magazines as being a certified set of accounts, I didn't but I did use it as basis for my back of the envelope exercise.
Elektor helpfully have a media kit, with advertising prices and circulation figures online - so let's use them for a little exercise in running the numbers. They have three other language editions which will require as much effort to put together as the English one, even if they have the same basic content (I know this from real practical experience), so I'm just going to take the English language edition as an example.
The English language printed version of Elektor has a circulation of 15,000 copies. There are 6 issues a year with a cover price of £9.95. That probably translates into a print run of 20,000 copies. The income from distribution will be about 50% of the cover price (the distributor and newsagents need to take their cut).
So that gives us an income from distribution of about £75,000 per issue.
Printing costs on a 100,000 run used to be about 1p a page around 2000 and I have not kept up with rates. Let's assume that standard inflation applies and call it 1.6p a page. Let's be generous and assume that Elektor can get a similar rate for their 20,000 run. The September/October 2017 issue of elektor had 132 pages, so it will have cost at least £42,240 to print.
Ad rates are 3000 euro/full page (1200 1/4 page). In the September/October 2017 issue there were 4 1/4 pages of advertising. That's 13,200 euros from advertising, £11,650.
Just using your figures, rough as they may be, they also highlight areas where attempts could have been made to save themselves. Let me make it plain here that I'm not in any way referring to Elektor in this example, just talking about electronic magazines that have ceased and assuming that what holds true for Elecktor also applied to them.
The English language printed version of Elektor has a circulation of 15,000 copies. There are 6 issues a year with a cover price of £9.95. That probably translates into a print run of 20,000 copies. The income from distribution will be about 50% of the cover price (the distributor and newsagents need to take their cut).
So that gives us an income from distribution of about £75,000 per issue.
Just the distribution alone with the wholesalers and newsagents taking their profits out of the cover price equating to something 50%, so removing them from the equation could result in the end price being reduced from £9.95 to something more like £5 a copy and I bet there many subscribers who would have continued to subscribe at that price.
Printing costs on a 100,000 run used to be about 1p a page around 2000 and I have not kept up with rates. Let's assume that standard inflation applies and call it 1.6p a page. Let's be generous and assume that Elektor can get a similar rate for their 20,000 run. The September/October 2017 issue of elektor had 132 pages, so it will have cost at least £42,240 to print.
Now, from the theoretical income of £75,000 there is the cost of printing and on the one given example that was approx. £42,000, thats another cost saved if its a downloaded magazine, thats already taken off a £117,000 per edition and if we were to carry that through to the bottom line that means a magazine subscription cost to the user of £2.70ish per month.
At that kind of cost I suggest that it would attract many many more subscribers and could with the media coverage go global and end up with a total subscriber base of in the order of hundreds of thousands and thats were the payoff would be to pay for the staff and nice plush offices etc, basically the a similar approach to how Tesco's came into being, by piling it high and selling cheaply, sell loads and make a little on each sale and it soon mounts up https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesco.
I don't pretend to be an expert by any means but to my mind, keeping it affordable, keeping it relevant, and keeping it interesting to the readers must be the key factors to success, if Tesco can do it then so can others.
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I can't help it but I still feel that magazines whether on line or in print are very expensive, ...
Nobody thats who, our posts are not vetted for accuracy or correctness prior to publishing them on the net. Magazines are supposed to do that by the editing team.
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By embracing the internet, switching to online, cheaper subscriptions, which should be possible as there are NO printing, distribution costs and no profit cuts to be taken by wholesalers or newsagents means that straight away that portion of the savings could be passed on to the consumer.
You still seem to miss the point that the origination costs are the same on-line or in print, and that makes up the lion's share of the costs. Running a magazine is like producing a new product every month, that is only on sale for that month, and doing the same thing again next month. The NRE (editorial costs) gets amortized over the product's lifetime, which in this case is one month. If the NRE is big enough the production costs fade toward irrelevance.
I've just done a quick back of the envelope calculation on just the editorial and layout costs (based on the section I used to edit in a real-to-goodness paper magazine) and staffing costs alone come out to around £500 per editorial page. Apply the, fairly standard, rule of thumb that the overheads (office, desk, computer, heating, lighting, etc. etc.) for someone are about the same as their salary, and that comes out at an origination cost of £1000 per page of editorial. Current freelance rates are running at £250-300/1000 words; that's for raw copy that has to be sub-edited, edited, and laid out before it can hit the page/screen.
That's a fixed cost of producing the magazine. All you can do to reduce that cost is to dilute it across as big a base of subscribers as you can. However, the potential number of possible subscribers for Electronics hobbyist magazines is low relative to the number of subscribers for more general interest publications. To give you an idea, in their heyday in the 90's, UK computer magazines (such as PC Magazine, Windows User, PC Pro or PC World) had audited circulations of 50,000 to perhaps 150,000, with 80,000 being a typical figure for the ones that were regarded as doing well. Elektor's current English (not UK, but all English language markets including USA and Canada) circulation is 15,000. You can, of course, pay peanuts and employ monkeys, but then what advantage do you have in quality over self-authored 'stuff' on the Internet.
The last Elektor I got my hands on had 132 pages with just 4 1/4 of those being advertising.
The only reason Elektor exists is that it already existed back in the heyday of print magazines. I suspect that is it slowly dying. With numbers like those, if someone today proposed to me a similar new venture, on-line or in print I wouldn't give it a hope in hell. People have got used to 'free' content and aren't prepared to pay what is required to support high quality content.
Do we pay each time we use a search engines or we use and of the apps that that are available on line from the likes of Google, word processing etc are all free.
Advertisers pay for it all and google as a result gets richer and richer and have very nice plush offices so the model has in theory been proven already.
Check out the rate per 1000 that you can get for on-line adverts and then compare that to the costs of producing content above. Elektor are asking 55 euro/1000 for their priciest spot, I don't know if that is a high rate or not, but I suspect it is. At that rate you'd need over 20,000 page views to cover the editorial costs of that page.
The CPM* average rate in 2015 was around $3 (about £2).
I'm afraid that the truth probably is that it's not a big enough market to support a diverse range of electronics hobbyist magazines either on-line or in print at prices that possible readers are prepared to pay.
You've just posted as I was about to post this. I'll post it anyway and then read what else you've had to say.
*CPM = Cost Per Mille aka cost per thousand
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Also some people seem to think that the origination costs magically disappear if you go to a PDF only version of a magazine. Again. no. The copy still needs editting, pages still need laying out, illustrations still need originating - in fact all the things that would be done to originate a print edition still need doing.
It's like comparing a Youtube channel that does one highly edited and polished video a week/month, and one that just uploads a live stream without editing, they are chalk and cheese.
Planning and editing, and all the mechanics that goes into producing polished content is what takes the most time and effort.
In this case a magazine, be it print or PDF, or a big polished formatted wordpress article take about the same amount of time.
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Now, from the theoretical income of £75,000 there is the cost of printing and on the one given example that was approx. £42,000, thats another cost saved if its a downloaded magazine, thats already taken off a £117,000 per edition and if we were to carry that through to the bottom line that means a magazine subscription cost to the user of £2.70ish per month.
BTW, the 15,000 circulation figure for Elektor in English I suspect includes PDF only subscriptions. They don't say, but knowing publishers they would never do anything to make their figures look smaller by, say, only counting paper circulation and not at least separately tabulating PDF circulation - so I conclude they are included in the headline (and only) circulation figure they give.
If you don't have a printed version then you don't have the print advertising revenue. Nobody is going to pay the £9.95 cover price for an online version, which seems to be an unstated assumption in your £117,000, they might pay the £5 you'd have got from distribution, but you've lost your print ad revenue along with your physical print costs.
If, big if, you can convert all your paper sales to online ones that's an income of just £40,500 per issue (at your £2.70 price) that's £243,000 per annum to produce 766 1/2 pages of editorial. At an origination cost of around £1000 per page, that's an annual net loss of £523,500.
If you did that with a £5 'cover price', and didn't lose any subscribers, that'd be a loss of £316,500 per annum.
Calculating the break even point is left to students of linear algebra. :)
I doubt there is enough price elasticity of demand to push the subscribers up very much while lowering the price. To even get to 'back of fag packet' calculations on that we'd need a proper economist with some figures for similar markets to use as a benchmark.
It's not looking good...
Like I said, I suspect that this is a dying sub-sector of the publishing business. I have a friend who's a fiction author; that too is a sector that is dying on its feet even with 99p ebook versions of many titles available.
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Check out the rate per 1000 that you can get for on-line adverts and then compare that to the costs of producing content above. Elektor are asking 55 euro/1000 for their priciest spot, I don't know if that is a high rate or not, but I suspect it is. At that rate you'd need over 20,000 page views to cover the editorial costs of that page.
That is actually a low rate compared to traditional magazine rate of days past. They have had to lower them to compete with online blogs and youtube channels etc, but even at 55EU CPM that's way above what I'm charging for example.
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Now, from the theoretical income of £75,000 there is the cost of printing and on the one given example that was approx. £42,000, thats another cost saved if its a downloaded magazine, thats already taken off a £117,000 per edition and if we were to carry that through to the bottom line that means a magazine subscription cost to the user of £2.70ish per month.
BTW, the 15,000 circulation figure for Elektor in English I suspect includes PDF only subscriptions. They don't say, but knowing publishers they would never do anything to make their figures look smaller by, say, only counting paper circulation and not at least separately tabulating PDF circulation - so I conclude they are included in the headline (and only) circulation figure they give.
Magazine circulation rate are always inflated, an industry standard multiplication figure is around x1.4
https://www.eevblog.com/2013/03/07/bloggers-dont-sell-out-cheap/ (https://www.eevblog.com/2013/03/07/bloggers-dont-sell-out-cheap/)
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You still seem to miss the point that the origination costs are the same on-line or in print, and that makes up the lion's share of the costs. Running a magazine is like producing a new product every month, that is only on sale for that month, and doing the same thing again next month. The NRE (editorial costs) gets amortized over the product's lifetime, which in this case is one month. If the NRE is big enough the production costs fade toward irrelevance.
No, I haven't missed the point at all, it stands to reason that the same costs of preparing the magazine are there what is not there is what you reckoned was the wholesaler/newsagent cut i.e the distribution costs, which you thought was about 50% of the cover price, none of which are required for online magazines and also I used the cost that you estimated it cost for "September/October 2017 issue of elektor had 132 pages, so it will have cost at least £42,240 to print"
I'm not looking for an argument or bad feeling, just merely using your figures that you quoted and taking a layman's view that if the wasted by products could be eliminated the price could be reduced and circulation might and I would certain expect it be to the case, should actually increase and that online magazines could possibly become viable and would be greener in the process.
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You still seem to miss the point that the origination costs are the same on-line or in print, and that makes up the lion's share of the costs. Running a magazine is like producing a new product every month, that is only on sale for that month, and doing the same thing again next month. The NRE (editorial costs) gets amortized over the product's lifetime, which in this case is one month. If the NRE is big enough the production costs fade toward irrelevance.
No, I haven't missed the point at all, it stands to reason that the same costs of preparing the magazine are there what is not there is what you reckoned was the wholesaler/newsagent cut i.e the distribution costs, which you thought was about 50% of the cover price, none of which are required for online magazines and also I used the cost that you estimated it cost for "September/October 2017 issue of elektor had 132 pages, so it will have cost at least £42,240 to print"
I'm not looking for an argument or bad feeling, just merely using your figures that you quoted and taking a layman's view that if the wasted by products could be eliminated the price could be reduced and circulation might and I would certain expect it be to the case, should actually increase and that online magazines could possibly become viable and would be greener in the process.
No, it's OK, I don't think you're spoiling for a fight.
I just don't think that you can expect people to still pay the printed cover price for an on-line only/PDF-only version. That's where I think your numbers fall apart. Once we get beyond that to debating what effect price will have on readership then I think we're just both trying to grope our way towards figuring out what would work in practice.
The cover price for individual copies of Elektor is £9.95, the price for PDF only individual copies is £6.95. The price for a six issue annual subscription (print + PDF + website member access) is £65.95, and a six issue subscription (PDF + website member access) is £48.95.
If that represents a true assessment of the discount the market expects for PDF only versus print, then the PDF 'cover' price can't be higher than 74% of the print cover price. As that is very close to 75% and they probably did their original calculation in euros, then adjusted prices to the magic X.95 format, I suspect it's an arbitrary figure, not a scientifically derived one. Anyway, nevertheless, I think it supports my argument that there is an expectation of a discount for PDF only access - in this case 74% of the cover price for the subscription with 'member benefits', 70% for individual copies.
Further, as I've already said, I'm far from convinced that a lower price translates into significantly higher sales. It might buy you a few, but I don't think it's enough to produce significantly higher net income overall. My suspicion is that the market is close to saturation, and that it's not a very price sensitive market. People who've £100s to spend on test gear, components and cases aren't going to be particularly sensitive to a few quid one way or another on related magazine prices. Again, that's one for someone with some real economics chops and data to figure out; the best we can come up with is gut feeling on that particular point. The closest we could come to empirical data on that point would be to run a poll on here - at least we have the target audience at our fingertips.
For what it's worth I tend to agree with your perception that current prices feel too high. That is not, however, the same as saying that they are objectively too high for the costs involved. Again, from experience, I know that publishers hate putting up cover prices almost as much as readers hate them going up and aren't want to raise prices unless circumstances force their hands.
Content is another matter, and I, like you, find recent content in electronics mags much less compelling than older content. If there's a leap in improvement to be made, it's probably here. If content is compelling, then reading the start of an article on the news-stand can make you say "Stuff, the price, I must read this article". This could, of course, lead us into a circular argument about the nature of a printed news-stand magazine that can be easily previewed versus a PDF that can't
Also, there is a risk of losing news-stand readership by converting to PDF only. I can't quantify that, but I'm certain that some readers would fall by the wayside that way. There will also be some holdouts that just won't covert from paper to PDF, whether that's a significant number is debatable, but there will be some. Those together would have to be more than offset by any gains in readership from a reduced PDF only price.
I do know that if I was having this debate in an editorial meeting that the debate would be at least as confused as here, and at least 20 degrees hotter. Second guessing your readership is one of the hardest things to do in publishing, and is definitely more of an art than a science.
I'm getting cross-eyed here, time for bed...
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Now, from the theoretical income of £75,000 there is the cost of printing and on the one given example that was approx. £42,000, thats another cost saved if its a downloaded magazine, thats already taken off a £117,000 per edition and if we were to carry that through to the bottom line that means a magazine subscription cost to the user of £2.70ish per month.
BTW, the 15,000 circulation figure for Elektor in English I suspect includes PDF only subscriptions. They don't say, but knowing publishers they would never do anything to make their figures look smaller by, say, only counting paper circulation and not at least separately tabulating PDF circulation - so I conclude they are included in the headline (and only) circulation figure they give.
Magazine circulation rate are always inflated, an industry standard multiplication figure is around x1.4
https://www.eevblog.com/2013/03/07/bloggers-dont-sell-out-cheap/ (https://www.eevblog.com/2013/03/07/bloggers-dont-sell-out-cheap/)
If you want to upset an ad space sales-droid or publisher ask them for audited paid sales figures.
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By embracing the internet, switching to online, cheaper subscriptions, which should be possible as there are NO printing, distribution costs and no profit cuts to be taken by wholesalers or newsagents means that straight away that portion of the savings could be passed on to the consumer. That alone might encourage existing subscribers to continue and attract more subscribers. More subscribers, bigger advertisers revenue as a result, better content for the consumer would also encourage more readers to subscribe, bigger circulation would attract more advertisers because they would be reaching more potential buyers. It is a cost induced thing, if it was free and had millions of subscribers worldwide downloading the publications the advertisers would be prepared to pay more because of the exposure that they get to the market. Now I'm not for a single minute suggesting that they should be free now but given time with the right leadership and drive to continue to engage in a meaningful way with subscribers I do believe that at some point in the future they could be and the magazines would have the right staff and offices to continue the process.
Please name an electronics magazine or two that has switched to a PDF only verion that is still successful...
I think you are oversimplifying the problem FAR too much.
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I tried subscribing to a pdf only magazine for a while, it was ok but I found I didn't enjoy it nearly as much as flipping through a real magazine. I was hoping someone would make a magazine-sized color e-ink reader but that doesn't seem to be happening.
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I can't help but feel robbed looking at the cover of my EPE. Distribution is 150% markup to Canada :rant: Elektor too.
Price alone will guarantee the mags sit on the shelf. When they don't sell, they eventually get dropped from the lineup in the store. This is part 1 of the decline of electronics magazines.
Forget about content or quality. The fat cats in distribution are a part of it.
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There are really only two mainstream platforms anymore, Windows and Mac.
You mean Android and Windows, right? ;)
https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/03/statcounter-android-windows/
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First, let me clarify my position here as I feel that my point is misconstrued.
I wanted to start taking an electronics magazine but could find any on the shelves in my home City, I scoured the Internet and again drew a blank, this got me thinking and hence the original post.
I'm not an expert on this topic by any means but looking at it in a simplistic format then this is how it strikes me.
A) Circulation of printed magazines is on the decline - Fact.
B) Internet happened - Fact
C) Printing costs money and uses up natural resources, paper, ink etc - Fact
D) Distribution, includes transporting, wholesalers and retailers - Fact
E) Loads of magazines have ceased all together - Fact
F) It costs the same amount of money to produce a magazine up to the point where it is ready to go of to the printers - Fact
G) The combined value of C & D is well over 50% of the printed magazine cover price at the retailers - Fact?
H) If the savings created by dropping C & D are passed onto the customer, with good content, there is a real possibility of readership increasing?
I) Most readers of magazines ceased reading them as the cost escalated, they have other more pressing demands for their money like day to day living in a world were wages have not kept pace with inflation and the recession.
J) Yes there will be some readers who will not switch over to PDF and so will be lost if the magazines go down that route - Fact.
K) The alternative is , if the magazines does not somehow turn things around, they will cease trading and everyone is then a loser - Fact
L) Take around the High Streets, whats the growth in there, it's the rise in the number of shops like Poundland and their rivals - Fact
M) You cannot rely on the "free" information on the internet to be correct as I have already pointed out, there is a load of dross out there - Fact
So what is the answer, short of everyone being paid a load more poney so that they feel wealthy enough to be meet all of the commitments and have some money left over in their pockets for what they see as luxuries and magazines are one of them. Or finding a way to provide a quality service at considerable less cost to the consumer to compete with other "luxuries".
If magazines are to survive long term, then they must evolve and become a thing of desire once again like they used to be, its perfectly clear that the current system is failing.
This topic was raised in the beginning because I was looking for a good magazine that perhaps I could buy, but I failed miserably in all the retailers who supplied magazines and newspapers to find a single one that was electronics based, forget your Arduino magazines, I'm talking of your hard core magazine here. There still seems to be some for model railways, boating, horses and model engineers which maybe are aimed at the better off customers.
Don't believe, put it to the test in your city then and see what you can find?
If anyone is confused about this thread, go back and read my opening post on the subject.
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Don't forget with print the most common method of distribution is via the "sale or return" method, so your print run of say 20 000 copies goes out on the 15th of the month to the distributor network, is on the shelf till the end of the next month ( for a monthly mag, longer for things that are quarterly or every 2 months) and then you get either a return of unsold copies, or a statement of scrapped copies around a month later, along with the sales figures for the ones sold, and the money for them less shipping costs and invoicing costs. Thus your income is generally 3 months behind the sale, and you can lose up to half the sale to returns.
Even worse for international sales, where you can have a 3 month shipping delay for the issue, and then another 3 months in the foreign country before you get even a statement of sale. Subscribers are slightly more lucky, you at least have a good idea of the number of sales, and while you do have to package them individually ( and if you are lucky you also choose a posting country to get a cheap rate, which is why your Elektor magazine is postmarked Schipol Airport, even if it was printed in the UK) and label them, plus sort per country as well, you at least have the money either 3, 6, 12 or 24 months in advance, in most cases non refundable as well.
The PDF versions is generally the best option for international sales, no cost above your server cost for the website, and slightly more for a CDN that handles the subscriber login and tracking the downloads per user to reduce piracy, often by either watermarking the PDF file itself, or using a (barf!) flash player on line. For a publisher with large numbers of international customers this is a very big customer base, and having no dead tree editions is a big cost cutter, as international magazine post, though cheap for the mass, is not a low cost item when you are driving a 10 ton truck to the post office a few times for different destination cut off points.
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Don't forget with print the most common method of distribution is via the "sale or return" method, so your print run of say 20 000 copies goes out on the 15th of the month to the distributor network, is on the shelf till the end of the next month ( for a monthly mag, longer for things that are quarterly or every 2 months) and then you get either a return of unsold copies, or a statement of scrapped copies around a month later, along with the sales figures for the ones sold, and the money for them less shipping costs and invoicing costs. Thus your income is generally 3 months behind the sale, and you can lose up to half the sale to returns.
Even worse for international sales, where you can have a 3 month shipping delay for the issue, and then another 3 months in the foreign country before you get even a statement of sale. Subscribers are slightly more lucky, you at least have a good idea of the number of sales, and while you do have to package them individually ( and if you are lucky you also choose a posting country to get a cheap rate, which is why your Elektor magazine is postmarked Schipol Airport, even if it was printed in the UK) and label them, plus sort per country as well, you at least have the money either 3, 6, 12 or 24 months in advance, in most cases non refundable as well.
The PDF versions is generally the best option for international sales, no cost above your server cost for the website, and slightly more for a CDN that handles the subscriber login and tracking the downloads per user to reduce piracy, often by either watermarking the PDF file itself, or using a (barf!) flash player on line. For a publisher with large numbers of international customers this is a very big customer base, and having no dead tree editions is a big cost cutter, as international magazine post, though cheap for the mass, is not a low cost item when you are driving a 10 ton truck to the post office a few times for different destination cut off points.
All these points are good ones, hence a pdf version makes good sense, no delivery, no returns etc.
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There are really only two mainstream platforms anymore, Windows and Mac.
You mean Android and Windows, right? ;)
https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/03/statcounter-android-windows/
what is this windows you speak of good sir? I use linux (fedora) I thought you GNU?
Anyways. only mag i get is QST from ARRL and that is just cause I am a ARRL member, for the most part I ain't really read mags in years, just find stuff online.
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There are really only two mainstream platforms anymore, Windows and Mac.
You mean Android and Windows, right? ;)
https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/03/statcounter-android-windows/
what is this windows you speak of good sir? I use linux (fedora) I thought you GNU?
Anyways. only mag i get is QST from ARRL and that is just cause I am a ARRL member, for the most part I ain't really read mags in years, just find stuff online.
As I understand it the whole idea of a PDF was that it was readable on any platform so a document only has to be created once and can be read across multiple platforms to enable things like magazines to made available at minimal cost to people otherwise they would have to make a version for each operating system and that would just add extra unwanted costs and burden on the publishers trying to get the copies ready for launch simultaneously across all platforms, a real nightmare.
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Don't forget with print the most common method of distribution is via the "sale or return" method, so your print run of say 20 000 copies goes out on the 15th of the month to the distributor network, is on the shelf till the end of the next month ( for a monthly mag, longer for things that are quarterly or every 2 months) and then you get either a return of unsold copies, or a statement of scrapped copies around a month later, along with the sales figures for the ones sold, and the money for them less shipping costs and invoicing costs. Thus your income is generally 3 months behind the sale, and you can lose up to half the sale to returns.
Even worse for international sales, where you can have a 3 month shipping delay for the issue, and then another 3 months in the foreign country before you get even a statement of sale. Subscribers are slightly more lucky, you at least have a good idea of the number of sales, and while you do have to package them individually ( and if you are lucky you also choose a posting country to get a cheap rate, which is why your Elektor magazine is postmarked Schipol Airport, even if it was printed in the UK) and label them, plus sort per country as well, you at least have the money either 3, 6, 12 or 24 months in advance, in most cases non refundable as well.
The PDF versions is generally the best option for international sales, no cost above your server cost for the website, and slightly more for a CDN that handles the subscriber login and tracking the downloads per user to reduce piracy, often by either watermarking the PDF file itself, or using a (barf!) flash player on line. For a publisher with large numbers of international customers this is a very big customer base, and having no dead tree editions is a big cost cutter, as international magazine post, though cheap for the mass, is not a low cost item when you are driving a 10 ton truck to the post office a few times for different destination cut off points.
The proof of the pudding is in the eating and very few, effectively none of the traditional magazines seem to make the transition without taking a huge beating. It seems to be a lot more complicated than this.
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Don't forget with print the most common method of distribution is via the "sale or return" method, so your print run of say 20 000 copies goes out on the 15th of the month to the distributor network, is on the shelf till the end of the next month ( for a monthly mag, longer for things that are quarterly or every 2 months) and then you get either a return of unsold copies, or a statement of scrapped copies around a month later, along with the sales figures for the ones sold, and the money for them less shipping costs and invoicing costs. Thus your income is generally 3 months behind the sale, and you can lose up to half the sale to returns.
Even worse for international sales, where you can have a 3 month shipping delay for the issue, and then another 3 months in the foreign country before you get even a statement of sale. Subscribers are slightly more lucky, you at least have a good idea of the number of sales, and while you do have to package them individually ( and if you are lucky you also choose a posting country to get a cheap rate, which is why your Elektor magazine is postmarked Schipol Airport, even if it was printed in the UK) and label them, plus sort per country as well, you at least have the money either 3, 6, 12 or 24 months in advance, in most cases non refundable as well.
The PDF versions is generally the best option for international sales, no cost above your server cost for the website, and slightly more for a CDN that handles the subscriber login and tracking the downloads per user to reduce piracy, often by either watermarking the PDF file itself, or using a (barf!) flash player on line. For a publisher with large numbers of international customers this is a very big customer base, and having no dead tree editions is a big cost cutter, as international magazine post, though cheap for the mass, is not a low cost item when you are driving a 10 ton truck to the post office a few times for different destination cut off points.
The proof of the pudding is in the eating and very few, effectively none of the traditional magazines seem to make the transition without taking a huge beating. It seems to be a lot more complicated than this.
I think the biggest problem maybe the way it has been handled, it probably needs to be done gradually by offering both versions for a while and making the PDF one so attractive price wise that you get a lot of existing subscribers switch at their next renewal date and then at a later date you announce withdrawal of the paper version and I would suspect that the majority would just accept the change and pocket the savings. What would be lost is the impulse purchase as there would be no physical presence sitting the retailers shelf to entice people.
Perhaps publishers should get together and run some website together and get the name banded about so anyone looking for a magazine automatically goes to that site and all online magazines of what ever discipline or publisher, are there for all to see what's available and have contact / subscription links on the site. Do it right and the site would be well known and the site of choice for magazines in the same way as Google and Bing are for search engines.
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The PDF versions is generally the best option for international sales, no cost above your server cost for the website, and slightly more for a CDN that handles the subscriber login and tracking the downloads per user to reduce piracy, often by either watermarking the PDF file itself, or using a (barf!) flash player on line. For a publisher with large numbers of international customers this is a very big customer base, and having no dead tree editions is a big cost cutter, as international magazine post, though cheap for the mass, is not a low cost item when you are driving a 10 ton truck to the post office a few times for different destination cut off points.
The proof of the pudding is in the eating and very few, effectively none of the traditional magazines seem to make the transition without taking a huge beating. It seems to be a lot more complicated than this.
IMHO one of the biggest problems is that traditional media companies think too much in old technology and want to keep control. Internet has changed all that and customers have way more control than they used to have. For example: in 1995 I started downloading music in MP3 format from internet and since then it has become easier and easier AND FREE! Only recently the music distributors seem to have gotten their heads around that proprietary formats and playback hardware are not going to work. So finally after more than 20 years you can pay and download MP3s from them in an easy way without any copyright protection.
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I tried subscribing to a pdf only magazine for a while, it was ok but I found I didn't enjoy it nearly as much as flipping through a real magazine. I was hoping someone would make a magazine-sized color e-ink reader but that doesn't seem to be happening.
I am also waiting for an A4 sized e-ink reader. Reading a long PDF in the computer screen is a pain in the neck, it is a lot more difficult to concentrate on it. The tablets, with their usually glossy and quite small screens are not much better. In the meantime, I just copy the PDFs to mi old iBook with 14 inch mate screen, sit down in a couch and put it on my lap in vertical position, like a real book.
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There are really only two mainstream platforms anymore, Windows and Mac.
You mean Android and Windows, right? ;)
https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/03/statcounter-android-windows/
what is this windows you speak of good sir? I use linux (fedora) I thought you GNU?
Anyways. only mag i get is QST from ARRL and that is just cause I am a ARRL member, for the most part I ain't really read mags in years, just find stuff online.
I'm well aware of Linux, it's on my primary machine at work and I have several Linux boxes at home as well but let's be realistic here, on the consumer desktop/laptop Linux penetration is negligible. Android is a mobile platform, not desktop. There are two mainstream platforms, Windows and Mac, with Windows holding a nearly 90% market share, that's simply a fact.
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There are really only two mainstream platforms anymore, Windows and Mac.
You mean Android and Windows, right? ;)
https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/03/statcounter-android-windows/
what is this windows you speak of good sir? I use linux (fedora) I thought you GNU?
Anyways. only mag i get is QST from ARRL and that is just cause I am a ARRL member, for the most part I ain't really read mags in years, just find stuff online.
I'm well aware of Linux, it's on my primary machine at work and I have several Linux boxes at home as well but let's be realistic here, on the consumer desktop/laptop Linux penetration is negligible. Android is a mobile platform, not desktop. There are two mainstream platforms, Windows and Mac, with Windows holding a nearly 90% market share, that's simply a fact.
Please children, can we not get into playground 'my platform can beat your platform up' arguments here - there are already 2000 odd threads that have descended into that morass, let's not make this another one. The truth is that your platforms are all down the pub together, moaning to each other that their users have no respect nowadays, listen to music that all sounds the same and all need a haircut and a proper suit.
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Somewhere we need to throw into the mix that publisher's ad revenues are declining too. That much is obvious from the shrinking number of print advertising pages.
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Somewhere we need to throw into the mix that publisher's ad revenues are declining too. That much is obvious from the shrinking number of print advertising pages.
Very true, the more we look the more complex gets :popcorn:
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There are really only two mainstream platforms anymore, Windows and Mac.
You mean Android and Windows, right? ;)
https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/03/statcounter-android-windows/ (https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/03/statcounter-android-windows/)
what is this windows you speak of good sir? I use linux (fedora) I thought you GNU?
Anyways. only mag i get is QST from ARRL and that is just cause I am a ARRL member, for the most part I ain't really read mags in years, just find stuff online.
There are at least 3 other PDF readers available for Linux see here https://www.linux.com/news/3-alternatives-adobe-pdf-reader-linux (https://www.linux.com/news/3-alternatives-adobe-pdf-reader-linux)
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There are at least 3 other PDF readers available for Linux see here https://www.linux.com/news/3-alternatives-adobe-pdf-reader-linux (https://www.linux.com/news/3-alternatives-adobe-pdf-reader-linux)
Side note: Unfortunately none of the alternative PDF readers I tried allowed to disable font & image anti-aliasing and thus are completely useless to me and others having problems focussing on anti-aliased text.
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I can't help but compare the magazine industry to the music industry.
Physical media (CD's) costs- it was supposed to be cheaper going digital.
Gone is the distributor's fat and overhead, no brick-and-mortar stores stocking CD's and DVD's, zero media cost aside from a website (i.e. iTunes or Spotify).
The graph shows old media's decline, although vinyl is making a small comeback.
But piracy has thrived and torrents with PDF's or ePub etc. lower sales.
I've only used one or two secure PDF readers, specialty viewers for secure documents. Right now, a PDF magazine is freely available for all to read, if you have the file.
graph with adjusted numbers from: http://theunderstatement.com/post/3362645556/the-real-death-of-the-music-industry (http://theunderstatement.com/post/3362645556/the-real-death-of-the-music-industry)
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I can't help but compare the magazine industry to the music industry.
True. Its also why bands had so much money and effort poured into the "singles" on the CD. Ultimately if you liked the single, you would purchase the CD, and then hopefully like the other 9-12 tracks. I think magazines face a similar problem, just like the music industry, there is less space for filler content. 8)
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I have zero sympathy for the RIAA. They spent decades screwing over everyone they could, then when digital came along instead of adapting they fought it tooth and nail, refusing to set up a legal avenue for digital distribution and once piracy became the norm they still refused digital that wasn't hobbled by draconian DRM. Then they started extorting money from customers threatening to sue anyone who may have downloaded anything if they didn't settle out of court, that being cheaper than trying to prove one's innocence. Prior to that there was the ridiculous hyperbola over people recording music off the radio with cassette decks. Personally I hope that industry does die, music will survive, it's been around since the dawn of humanity. The only time I buy new music anymore is when I can buy it directly from the artists, otherwise I buy used vinyl or CDs.
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Hi, speaking about Magazines, I would like to ask for some help from the people in Australia.
Do you know if the AWA Tech. Rev. is available somewhere on-line ?
I am trying to find an article from the A.W.A. Technical Review Vol. 6 Issue 4, March 1944, page 193
Rudd, J.B. "Theory and Design of radio-frequency transformers" :(
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This thread seems to blame economics for the demise of electronics magazines, although there is disagreement about the details. I think content is an equally big issue, which failed horribly in the US. I have been a subscriber to many of the electronics/computer magazines here in the US, and continue to hold a subscription to the sole survivor - Nuts and Volts. They all have deserved to die. I keep the Nuts and Volts subscription going out of loyalty to the medium, nothing else.
Content has been victim many things. Many of the simple projects which were bread and butter to these magazines in the 50's, 60's and 70's like intermittent windshield washer timers, light dimmers and the like are now available dirt cheap in a nice package. Easy to obtain components are getting smaller and require specialized equipment to work with. Legal liability has killed off the most of the Tesla coils, electromagnetic guns and solid state welder type projects. But most importantly, there don't seem to be many good ideas or authors out there.
Leading to bizarre stuff. Radio Electronics magazine was publishing New Age foo foo stuff prior to their demise. Nuts and Volts has published articles on how to blink an LED on every microcomputer in every language there is. I open Nuts and Volts and finish scanning/reading in just a few minutes. Nothing of interest.
You could reduce the publishing costs to zero and this stuff would have trouble surviving.
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Leading to bizarre stuff. Radio Electronics magazine was publishing New Age foo foo stuff prior to their demise. Nuts and Volts has published articles on how to blink an LED on every microcomputer in every language there is. I open Nuts and Volts and finish scanning/reading in just a few minutes. Nothing of interest.
You could reduce the publishing costs to zero and this stuff would have trouble surviving.
I don't recall the new age stuff in Radio Electronics, is there an example that comes to mind? I have years of that magazine I subscribed to up until their demise, been a while since I've looked at the later ones.
Much of the reason for the last point is that virtually all of that same content is already available online. Very few projects in Nuts & Volts are unique, with almost any of them I can easily find a similar project documented on some random web page. I too have noticed that it takes me about 5 minutes to read an entire issue, the most recent one is so thin I almost tossed it into the recycle bin with the rest of the junkmail flyers until I got a better look and realized it was a magazine.
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Journalism globally generally needs some new business models !
The Web is a hugely positive thing - not the villian many frame it as, but its original promise is being frustrated in a lot of different ways.
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I've worked as a school teacher. The issue with electronics at schools (particularly in Australia) is students are passive consumers rather than active "makers". This occurs in electronics, computing and software.
The only electronics I've taught has been with the Raspberry Pi and robotics.
One very accomplished student, who is now studying electronic engineering, had no real electronics knowledge, did not have a soldering iron. But he is a whiz at advanced maths, which he needed to get him into a top university.
I have been interested in electronics since age six. You don't see this interest in schools.
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I've worked as a school teacher. The issue with electronics at schools (particularly in Australia) is students are passive consumers rather than active "makers". This occurs in electronics, computing and software.
The only electronics I've taught has been with the Raspberry Pi and robotics.
One very accomplished student, who is now studying electronic engineering, had no real electronics knowledge, did not have a soldering iron. But he is a whiz at advanced maths, which he needed to get him into a top university.
I have been interested in electronics since age six. You don't see this interest in schools.
In a roundabout way you have almost proved my point, What is there is there to stimulate peoples interest in electronics, no real magazines to speak of, those that are still hanging on lack anything of real interest as has been mentioned and what there is plenty of, and indeed you have taught it as well, is micro controllers such as Raspberry Pi and Arduinos, where are the electronics engineers that we need going to come from in years to come? We need people with skills to both repair electronics beyond just swapping out modules, and we also need those with the design skills to keep the momentum rolling forwards.
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Leading to bizarre stuff. Radio Electronics magazine was publishing New Age foo foo stuff prior to their demise. Nuts and Volts has published articles on how to blink an LED on every microcomputer in every language there is. I open Nuts and Volts and finish scanning/reading in just a few minutes. Nothing of interest.
You could reduce the publishing costs to zero and this stuff would have trouble surviving.
I don't recall the new age stuff in Radio Electronics, is there an example that comes to mind? I have years of that magazine I subscribed to up until their demise, been a while since I've looked at the later ones.
Much of the reason for the last point is that virtually all of that same content is already available online. Very few projects in Nuts & Volts are unique, with almost any of them I can easily find a similar project documented on some random web page. I too have noticed that it takes me about 5 minutes to read an entire issue, the most recent one is so thin I almost tossed it into the recycle bin with the rest of the junkmail flyers until I got a better look and realized it was a magazine.
Articles on pyramid power and the possibility that the Egyptian pyramids were actually giant transmitters. I wrote the editors on this - they apologized and commented that they were short on material.
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"Electronics Australia" decided the way to go was to dump all the Technical stuff & become "an Electronics lifestyle magazine". :palm:
That lasted one issue & the mag folded!
I actually bought that issue, & all it really contained was the same stuff you could pick up free at any of the large white goods/ computer/ HI-FI stores.
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Wow, one issue? I would have expected it to go longer than that just from momentum. Perhaps it was a last ditch effort that was immediately obvious was a failure.
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Articles on pyramid power and the possibility that the Egyptian pyramids were actually giant transmitters. I wrote the editors on this - they apologized and commented that they were short on material.
I must have missed that somehow, maybe I just tuned it out as I do with all the other content that doesn't interest me. I do recall an article in one of those magazines about an energy saving driver for low voltage incandescent lamps, clearly written by someone who didn't understand the limitations of an averaging DMM.
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Does this smell the same as Dick Smith, Maplin, Radio Shack?
Customer's needs and the market changes. Inept management makes moves in the wrong direction and the dinosaur dies, instead of evolving as needed.
EE's aren't the greatest at managing things like this, they (we) are technical types and don't have awareness of the popular social aspect, the business component.
I think electronics magazines can succeed, they just need to make adjustments and keep on track with the market.
What if we put together something about what to ditch and what to keep or expand for content?
Otherwise, it's all guesswork for a magazine's management, editors and crew. Pretty tough.
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I think the problem is deeper and the magazine as a medium is in danger of going extinct. I don't know anyone under about 30 who still subscribes to magazines and a purely digital model may as well be a website to most people. The world is never going to return to the 1970s and earlier when it made sense for a lot of people to build cool gadgets out of discrete parts. Electronic gadgets in general are far cheaper than they were back then and overall they are far more complex too. People still build stuff, but only the ones who want to tinker. Back in the day a lot of people got into electronics out of necessity, if they couldn't build a gadget they wanted themselves they couldn't afford it.
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I think Circuit Cellar is still around also.
Circuit Cellar is still around. It was bought by Elektor about ten years ago, but a year or two ago Steve Ciarcia, the founder of the magazine, bought it back from Elektor. They've recently changed editors and the new editor seems much better than the previous one.
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I think the problem is deeper and the magazine as a medium is in danger of going extinct. I don't know anyone under about 30 who still subscribes to magazines and a purely digital model may as well be a website to most people. The world is never going to return to the 1970s and earlier when it made sense for a lot of people to build cool gadgets out of discrete parts. Electronic gadgets in general are far cheaper than they were back then and overall they are far more complex too. People still build stuff, but only the ones who want to tinker. Back in the day a lot of people got into electronics out of necessity, if they couldn't build a gadget they wanted themselves they couldn't afford it.
It isn't just about building gadgets, its about learning electronics and learning how to take something, tinker with it and tweak it to do something else as well. Over here in the UK I can get a few magazines all about building things with Raspberry Pi's and Arduinos, but there re for the most part pre-built modules with a handful of discrete parts used to couple them together and some code to be written.
Where are all the engineers coming from in the future to design the next generation of controllers for instance if all they know is how to connect modules together? Someone has to think about the modules and design them in the first instance and if we are not careful that skill will be gone.
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Hi, speaking about Magazines, I would like to ask for some help from the people in Australia.
Do you know if the AWA Tech. Rev. is available somewhere on-line ?
I am trying to find an article from the A.W.A. Technical Review Vol. 6 Issue 4, March 1944, page 193
Rudd, J.B. "Theory and Design of radio-frequency transformers" :(
To answer the question that resurrected this thread: no, I don't think any of the AWA Tech Review series are available on-line; at least, I've never found any. The NLA has a full set (https://catalogue.nla.gov.au/Record/2365696), and a few university libraries have either full or partial sets - but, unfortunately, not any that I currently have access to.
You can try requesting a PDF copy of the article from the NLA's CopyDirect service - although they say they might not be able to do it as copyright status is "uncertain", I've had no troubles with them doing copies of individual articles under similar circumstances. Cost, last I looked, was AU$16.50 for up to 50 pages or part thereof.
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It isn't just about building gadgets, its about learning electronics and learning how to take something, tinker with it and tweak it to do something else as well. Over here in the UK I can get a few magazines all about building things with Raspberry Pi's and Arduinos, but there re for the most part pre-built modules with a handful of discrete parts used to couple them together and some code to be written.
Where are all the engineers coming from in the future to design the next generation of controllers for instance if all they know is how to connect modules together? Someone has to think about the modules and design them in the first instance and if we are not careful that skill will be gone.
All that information is available online now and there's more of it than ever. People may start out connecting modules together but some of them eventually dig in deeper and move on to more advanced things. There are kids designing PCBs and building stuff with surface mount parts, things very few established hobbyists were doing 20-30 years ago. I can only imagine how much more I'd have been able to learn if I'd had access to the modern internet and all the sources of parts we have today instead of just the magazines I had when I was a kid.
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It isn't just about building gadgets, its about learning electronics and learning how to take something, tinker with it and tweak it to do something else as well. Over here in the UK I can get a few magazines all about building things with Raspberry Pi's and Arduinos, but there re for the most part pre-built modules with a handful of discrete parts used to couple them together and some code to be written.
Where are all the engineers coming from in the future to design the next generation of controllers for instance if all they know is how to connect modules together? Someone has to think about the modules and design them in the first instance and if we are not careful that skill will be gone.
All that information is available online now and there's more of it than ever. People may start out connecting modules together but some of them eventually dig in deeper and move on to more advanced things. There are kids designing PCBs and building stuff with surface mount parts, things very few established hobbyists were doing 20-30 years ago. I can only imagine how much more I'd have been able to learn if I'd had access to the modern internet and all the sources of parts we have today instead of just the magazines I had when I was a kid.
There is a definite caveat in this.
In quite a few occasions, the circuits presented on the Internet are unworkable.
I covered this in Reply 29.
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I've worked as a school teacher. The issue with electronics at schools (particularly in Australia) is students are passive consumers rather than active "makers". This occurs in electronics, computing and software.
The only electronics I've taught has been with the Raspberry Pi and robotics.
One very accomplished student, who is now studying electronic engineering, had no real electronics knowledge, did not have a soldering iron. But he is a whiz at advanced maths, which he needed to get him into a top university.
I have been interested in electronics since age six. You don't see this interest in schools.
I teach electronics in the introductory "Year 0" at the local technical university (UTU). It is for students who have done only the normal High School instead of the technical one. About 80 % of each generation want to study power electricity. This is because they feel that, with the dirty cheap and disposable electronic devices of today, they will not find a job in electronics. :-//
When I show them old issues of the now defunct magazine "Corriente Alterna", they are amazed about all things that once where built here.
By the way, I started with electronics at age ten (Although I called it then Radiotechnics) :)
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The same trend here, power electronics, energy and utility will always be part of each community, jobs guaranteed.
Low voltage, digital electronics jobs are gone or leaving towards the east :(
You can't blame a student to choose for a career that will feed his family but sad it is.
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In quite a few occasions, the circuits presented on the Internet are unworkable.
I covered this in Reply 29.
Not only unworkable, but many times dangerous.
Anyone can Google "capacitive power supply", and find circuits which claim that will get 5 volts @ 1 amp from a 230 volt AC supply, to cheaply power your next Arduino project.
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I don't know about you guys, but I managed to cobble together plenty of unworkable and/or dangerous projects on my own without any help from the internet. Yes there is a lot of noise on the net but there is a lot of good stuff too. I'm nostalgic about the old magazines but archives still exist. The world has changed and that model is just not likely to be sustainable going forward. There's a saying along the lines of "the worst enemy of the best is good enough" and for most people now the internet is good enough.