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From: herrickd@iccgcc.decnet.ab.com
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: CD-ROM documents (was Paperless Office)
Message-ID: <2209.27561d1c@iccgcc.decnet.ab.com>
Date: 30 Nov 90 13:49:31 GMT
References: <1990Nov16.234227.3246@cs.cmu.edu> <11191@pt.cs.cmu.edu> <00940487.15804140@KING.ENG.UMD.EDU>,<28083@mimsy.umd.edu> <009406EF.82F93E60@KING.ENG.UMD.EDU>
Lines: 78

In article <009406EF.82F93E60@KING.ENG.UMD.EDU>, sysmgr@KING.ENG.UMD.EDU (Doug Mohney) writes:
> 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. 

I read the same thing.  In something like The New Papyrus, the first
Microsoft CDROM Symposium.  4 or 5 years ago.  Another price learning
curve.  Slower than silicon.

>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.

I would pay $50 or $100 for a CDROM holding all of the IEEE periodicals
for a year.  Willing to wait a year for a clearance sale.  They may not
fit on one CDROM.  The ACM collection might.  It would make sense for
the initial price to be significantly less than the subscription price
of the paper or microform copies.  Take the current cost figures, back
out all printing and mailing costs, put in digitizing, mastering, CDROM
production, and mailing costs.  The cost should come out about two thirds
of current costs.  Lower if manuscripts were submitted in electronic
form, but that makes a different production path for the two versions, 
meaning they would diverge.

The National Geographic is another game entirely.  They could begin a new
publishing venture.  Each monthly issue is one CDROM.  Subscription price
does not change.  The photographs are GIF or something with higher fidelity,
some are animated, the maps are digitized data that can be displayed
at various levels of detail, the CDROM holds access software for MSDOS,
MAC, and Amiga (or some other list - maybe there is one CDROM with
software for fifty architectures distributed annually with occasional
updates stuck on the monthly).  The articles are there in their present
form, but there is one or two levels of primary sources behind them (a
keypress away).

Interesting supplement (or an article) - 100 years of National Geographic
maps of Europe, viewable as an animation through time.

Lots of libraries have CDROM drives on computers, but not many homes.
(Interesting use of relative quantifiers - "lots" means a few thousand,
"not many" means a few thousand, probably several thousand more than
"lots".)  It might be that a way for Sony or Philips to increase the
penetration of CDROM drives into the market is to subsidize National
Geographic in the startup costs of such a venture.  Why are CDROM 
drives moving down the price learning curve so much slower than CD players?
 
>                           %%%%% 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?        *

dan herrick
dlh Performance Marketing
POBox 1419
Mentor, Ohio  44061
(216)974-9637
herrickd@astro.pc.ab.com