Changing Times for Reader Service

Last summer, I got a call from a reader complaining about our reader service program. He had gone onto the EEPN web site, clicked on “Reader Service” and expected to find links to all the information he was looking for. Instead, we asked him to fill out a form and told him that we would forward the information to him by mail. He asked me, “What sense does that make?” And then said, “I need information right away. And by the way, I don’t want to fill out the form every time I visit the site.”

His comments got me thinking about reader service and how it might be improved. This year you’ll see how we’ve improved the program, though it’s not yet ready to launch. However, we have made a change that you will see in this issue. The Reader Service card is gone—again. We discontinued it a few years ago, but then brought it back. Now we’re letting it go again. I’m sure a small percentage of our readers who depend on this card for their information will not like the change. Hopefully, our new system will do a better job for them.

I’ve tried to think of the ancillary material you would most likely want after reading about a product that appears in one or more of the different media we publish: EEPN, the digital edition of EEPN, our Products of the Week e-newsletter, our companion publication eepn2, and our web site www.eepn.com. I’ve come up with the following: datasheet, application note, sample request and e-mail contact information (we’ll continue to list telephone numbers in our writeups). From now on, our reader service page will have direct links to these four pieces of information. And if any of them are not available, we’ll let you know.

I expect this new system, which should go into effect for our February issue, will provide you with an easy way to find most or all of the information you need for a particular product. And if the items I’ve listed above are not the top four items on your list, I’d like to know about it.

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