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From: bill@bilver.uucp (Bill Vermillion)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: CD-ROM documents (was Paperless Office)
Message-ID: <1990Nov30.070149.14816@bilver.uucp>
Date: 30 Nov 90 07:01:49 GMT
References: <00940487.15804140@KING.ENG.UMD.EDU> <28083@mimsy.umd.edu> <009406EF.82F93E60@KING.ENG.UMD.EDU>
Reply-To: bill@bilver.UUCP (Bill Vermillion)
Organization: W. J. Vermillion - Winter Park, FL
Lines: 38

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.

Well making a music master tape isn't free.  When I worked in the studio
the cost to do a major label production was from $100,000 to $250,000
dollars, but that's another story.

>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 :-)
>

I have a question, how about a wild guess as to how long it would take for
you to assemble, on 1/2 tape or equivalent, 500 MEGABYTES of program to put
on that CD, and to put it in the format needed.   I suspect that even if
the programs were FREE, the cost of assembly would raise the cost quite a
bit.  It's one thing to make a disk, but to make the tape equivalent of 500
before you master it is a bit intimidating.

So labor costs of assembling such a beast are not a small item if it is a
limited run CD-ROM.



-- 
Bill Vermillion - UUCP: uunet!tarpit!bilver!bill
                      : bill@bilver.UUCP


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