That will always be the case. There will be software revisions right up until it is released, and until there is a stable software version released they can't rewrite the book.



Where have you seen it for €15? Best I have seen is €19.

There seems to be 2 different covers for this book, are there any differences in the text of each of these?

Maybe so, but sellers on ebay seem to be advertising either or!

Someone should raise that pantograph.

...you missed my point: Articles about the new thing still needs to be written. They will be in the Märklin Magazine for months (and years) to come. I would assume that they would need a bit more information about the actual use of the product and its features, before they can justify printing a new book.

Ah, then I will re-evaluate the utility of the book at all. Märklin knows the product itself and what it is intended to be used for. They should be able to write up an article for describing new central stations and what new features those models provide. If they don't have their own authors and are relying on external submissions then it would take longer as real users in the field would need to want to bother writing the magazine articles. If they are internally written at Märklin then there is no reason their writers cannot already be going at producing such articles. Again, the company knows most of what the features are and how they should be used. Its not like they are producing a product that has some wide feature range and are throwing it out there with the expectation that the consumer market will figure out interesting and useful ways of using it that they have not thought of.

Now if they intend to FIRST publish such articles in a magazine for some months after the product is released, and only then bundle that content into the new book, fine, that pushes back the book needlessly (in my mind) to the benefit of selling magazines (which may be the right business decision).

However I have to think that if the book has any technical value at all, having it being available as close as possible to the launch of the hardware is a good thing. That is how every other book-to-go-with-product pairing I've come across works.

I don't know the business model for the magazines and books -I don't have any of them. I'm just an engineer building a layout who wants to buy one book that covers the broad variety of digital products and how they are used to include the new stuff coming out in 2016. It sounds like there's a more complex interaction that goes on with the hardware, magazines and books that I knew about nor would have expected.

But I'll stand by the notion that if the new CS3/3+ are coming out later this year, that any internal to Märklin, and even typical external, writers of these articles and content cannot already be writing some of these articles based on what they know will be available and new. If the product is due to ship later this year the features/functions have got to be mostly locked down ad they have prototypes and early production units they can work with to produce the content.


I would like to see a more technical treatment. Thats one of the reasons I am looking to the book - because the general manuals are so much hand-waving that it hides technical information under marketing and naming conventions and confuses technically savy users. It would be nice if a newbie, at whom such a book is aimed, could learn the various hardware to be used in digital today, and how they are used to what modeling situations are solved with what parts arranged how, and why, if all of that could be found in this book for an 80-90% solution.

Rather than having to read dozens and dozens of PDFs scattered about the internet, visit lots of forums to learn the knowledge handed down in posts and your never quite sure if that post from 2004 still applies to the technology in 2016 or not...

Yes, that is the older digital book - I have the German version. There was also an English version of that book, so hopefully there will be an English version of the new book sometime.

That is a good case for purchasing both the 1994 edition (for the in depth detail) and the current version (when did it come out? 200x?) - but the cost of such a thing is prohibitive for what you get I think.

Maybe in the end I'll just build my own book from what I can find on the internet.

There have been two articles in the marklin Magazine on the cs3 features, and the second article lists about six more to come (I received my 02/2016 Trix Proficlub mailing about a fortnight ago, but not seen the Marklin one yet). So expect any updated reprint of the book to be at least a year away, and I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't announced until the 2018 NI, with delivery anything up to a year beyond that.