Although there are many reasons why this isn’t an entirely unbiased survey, the results of the readership survey carried out by Gelszus Messe-Marktforshung at Embedded World are always interesting. The study asks “Which of these electronics trade journals do you read on a regular basis?” The first thing I noticed was that the readership of magazines isn’t dropping. As we saw last year, the average German engineer claims to read about 2.5 journals on a regular basis: clearly their appetite for print is not falling.
The one publication that showed a significant change was ELEKTRONIKPRAXIS. It’s difficult, however, to draw any firm conclusions, as the near disappearance of the title at the event meant that the Weka domination show was even stronger than before. Whilst I don’t want to go into the rights and wrongs of why ELEKTRONIKPRAXIS didn’t exhibit or have a stronger presence, I do think that the impact of the decision means that we must put even less faith in the readership survey being an accurate representation of the reading habits of all German engineers than we could have done in previous years.
