Goodbye, hello

I have been commenting here on events in the international home improvement industry for the last eleven years. My predecessors had been doing this since 1989, when the magazine was created.
Unusually, the comment this time is about us, and thus ultimately about you. This is because you are holding the last issue of the DIY International trade magazine in your hand (unless you have already been reading the e-magazine version online on your screen).
Dähne Verlag, which has published the magazine from the beginning, has taken a radical decision: DIY International will no longer appear in print. It will instead be put out in future exclusively as an online publication at the familiar address www.­diyinternational.com.
This means specifically that the editorial team will continue to work as before, collecting and checking information and preparing it. You will receive the result of this work much faster in future, however, because the complete production process from submission of manuscripts to dispatch of the magazine is no longer required.
To be perfectly honest, none of this is really new to us. After all, the accompanying online service www.diyinternational.com has been in existence for nearly 20 years.
News will continue to be published on a daily basis; there will still be a newsletter (and it will appear more frequently); and some information will continue to be exclusively available to subscribers (for example, the detailed country reports/regional reports with statistical material from the research department of DIY Internation­al). A piece in this last issue titled "Everything stays different" gives you more information about this. The publishing house will also write to subscribers when the process has moved forward in the first few months of 2022.

If you ask me, who grew up in the world of print, it is absolutely the right deci­sion. In the last thirty years, a host of other things have changed. The magazine was initially published in three languages (!), German, English and French. The French version was dropped in 2002. In 2009, the magazine's name at the time, DIY in Europe, was even changed and at the same time the magazine was published entirely in English.
All these changes were fully justified. And what is more obvious in 2021…