Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!watmath!att!linac!uwm.edu!ux1.cso.uiuc.edu!midway!mimsy!mojo!SYSMGR@KING.ENG.UMD.EDU
From: sysmgr@KING.ENG.UMD.EDU (Doug Mohney)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: CD-ROM documents (was Paperless Office)
Message-ID: <009406EF.82F93E60@KING.ENG.UMD.EDU>
Date: 29 Nov 90 15:43:51 GMT
References: <1990Nov16.234227.3246@cs.cmu.edu> <11191@pt.cs.cmu.edu> <00940487.15804140@KING.ENG.UMD.EDU>,<28083@mimsy.umd.edu>
Sender: news@eng.umd.edu (C-News)
Reply-To: sysmgr@KING.ENG.UMD.EDU (Doug Mohney)
Organization: The U. of MD, CP, CAD lab
Lines: 30

In article <28083@mimsy.umd.edu>, chris@mimsy.umd.edu (Chris Torek) writes:

>Musician friends tell me that you can walk into a CD house with a digital
>master tape, plunk down $2000, and walk out with a digital master tape
>and 1000 CDs.  This means that the cost is $2/CD for very low volumes,
>hence only lower for reasonable volumes.  I have no idea whether CD-ROMs
>use the same mastering techniques as music CDs, but a good estimate for
>100% markups at two levels of delivery would put CD-ROM prices at around
>$5 each, *provided* that the equivalent of `making the master tape' was
>free.

Hum...I remember reading something somewhere (yes, memory fails again. Guess
I'll have to get an AI prompter like Henry has), whereby making a CD-ROM in
small production was $5-10K. Again, I was wondering about the labor costs
involved to put everything together...of course, it wouldn't surprise me if
they were just gouge-happy mongrels wanting to make a buck :-)

>Personally, I would imagine people would happily pay the same as the
>total price of the year's issues for a year-end CD-ROM of a technical
>journal.  Shipping this should cost much less than shipping a year's
>worth of the journal!  (Libraries would pay this, and then get rid of
>the paper version, so as to fit more in less space.  Shelf space is
>expensive!)

I wonder if people will be giving up their stacks of National Geographic for a
CD-ROM? Would kill a tradition. 
                          %%%%% Signature v1.1 %%%%%
 Doug Mohney, Operations Manager, CAD Lab/ME, Univ. of Maryland College Park
*    Why do VMS system managers get more sleep and less ulcers than their  *
*        UNIX(TM) counterparts, despite the sophistication of UNIX?        *