Editorial

Dear Friends

 As most of you probably know, I am addressing you today via the editorial of this magazine for the last time. After more than a year, we are concluding our effort to bring you interesting and unusual reading from the field of history and plastic modeling with this, the ninth issue. We decided to offer a magazine for moments of relaxation in your modeling easy chairs, which would be a mixture of news, lesser-known stories from the mosaic of history, and fresh perspectives on more familiar themes. And in a way that would be reader-friendly, with well-processed content both in terms of text and graphics, with, last but not least, an appropriate reading comfort level, which is always a challenge with online media.

And I am convinced that we have succeeded. Eduard Modeller’s Den is a magazine that has set and kept its bar high. It has managed to gather around it quality authors, bringing interesting topics and awakening in many of you the anticipation of the next issue.

However, this alone is far from good enough. Part of the concept of the developing magazine was also the idea that this project would make money on its own. Despite all our efforts, we were unable to obtain enough sales (enough paying readers) for the magazine to pay for itself.

We expected that the launch would have its pitfalls, and that the whole thing would require our patience and the certainty given by the publisher's background. And we were patient and forgiving. However, after a certain period of time, the trajectory of sales and pre-orders of the magazine showed stagnation, which did not give much hope that the ice would be broken. We looked for reasons and solutions, and postponed any decision to end the EMD project.

It is probably essentially pointless to elaborate on the reasons that we consider relevant, but I will nevertheless mention the one that we consider to be the main one – despite its content, EMD was unable to break the general aversion to purchasing readable content on the Internet, associated with registration and, of course, payment. And this despite the fact that we offered bonuses in the form of discount coupons for the Eduard e-shop as a counter-value, with which the reader (if he was both a modeler and an Eduard customer) could get much more than he invested in purchasing the magazine. To a certain extent, we are to blame for this – for many years we have been educating our readers to the fact that they can expect an extensive magazine from us every month, or a newsletter if you like, for free of which EMD is a paid supplement. And many of our readers simply did not want to buy a paid supplement, even with exclusive content. And this is where our assumptions were most out of touch with reality.

Of course, it was possible to postpone the end of the EMD project given that the regular monthly newsletter itself does not generate any revenue at all, but it is a logical component of a company like ours.

However, in (not only) economically turbulent times, such as the one in which we have all been struggling for many months and even years, it is not possible to maintain a non-profit project like the EMD magazine in the long term.

However, not everything that EMD brought with it will disappear with its end. Some columns will be incorporated into the monthly regular newsletter, such as the ongoing series Plastos, model galleries in the form of Model&Story, and the recently launched series of articles Stars in the Dust and in the Sky about personalities from the cultural and scientific spheres in connection with their participation in historical events.

On the other hand, a section like Warning Shots – although certainly beneficial for modelers – will disappear completely. We do not think its inclusion in the Eduard newsletter would be appropriate or fair. And then there are sections like the editorial by the editor-in-chief that you are reading now, current events and historical notes, and the debriefing feature, which would either lose their meaning in the newsletter or duplicate existing sections.

A completely separate issue that we need to resolve in connection with the termination of EMD is the settlement with subscribers who are entitled to issues that are no longer being published. I can assure you that in the coming weeks all subscribers whose claims have not been met will be contacted individually and we will discuss compensation related to our obligations to them.

In the thirteen months during which we published ten issues of EMD, including the inaugural issue from December 2024, the team involved in its implementation has done a great deal of quality work. And I am sure that we have an achievement behind us that we need not be ashamed of.

I would like to thank our authors, colleagues from the editorial board, graphic designers, Triobo, which provided the platform on which the magazine was published, and last but not least, you, our readers, for the favor and support you have given to the Eduard Modeller's Den magazine.

I wish you all the best and look forward to meeting you again through the pages of the monthly Eduard newsletter Info.

Jan Zdiarsky

Chief Editor