Nix on the dying hobby -- US ham population increses yearly

My take is with so much info free on the web, publishers and authors are
hurting.

--
One Watt

To steal ideas from one person is plagiarism;
to steal from many is research.
-- Comedian Steven Wright


"Marvin Moss" wrote in message
ink.net...
What is going on in the publishing world?

I renewed for three years to some of my favorite
magazines like 73 Mag, Poptronics, and
Electronic Servicing & Technology and they appear to
have gone under leaving me with no subscriptions
and not even a transfer of my subscription to
another magazine as a substitute.

This makes me an unhappy camper not only because
of the loss of money but because I loved getting
these magazines every month.

Do you have any thoughts on this trend?

Nuts and Volts remains the main general electronic hobbyist magazine; but
there are lots of other specialty newsletters on specific areas such as
robotics, and even embedded processors, microwaves, radio astronomy, and
so on. As noted, lots of material for the smaller groups has migrated to
the WWW too. If your interests are for a specific area or topic as most of
us seem to be, this may be a positive thing, since the volume of online
resources are much greater than a general interest ham magazine could
publish on paper.

The USA ham population is growing Very! slowly (fraction of a %), and the
amount being spent remains about the same (a few $/day per active ham).
However, the USA ham population is still aging rapidly demographically,
meaning few young newcomers and lots of older participants and re-treads
coming back into the hobby, yes?

I do agree that it would be useful to have a "pseudo" ham magazine portal
in which different "columnists" would organize, review, and point out the
best WWW resources, sources of project parts or components, and so on.

What we are lacking is a means to pay moderate $$ to authors for articles.
The new "milli-cent" billing technology may make that possible shortly,
with digital public key encryption and embedded buyer tags in the
articles. IEEE has a system where these tags can be recovered even from
xeroxed copies, based on shifted up/down lines and characters in the
documents, making theft or distribution of the documents much less likely.

so we may be on the verge of a renaissance of online specialty magazines
once these new technologies get widely used (similar to paying for music
downloads, but articles instead etc.).

bobm
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