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From: csg@pyramid.pyramid.com (Carl S. Gutekunst)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.iso
Subject: Re: High Cost of OSIng
Message-ID: <141308@pyramid.pyramid.com>
Date: 16 Jan 91 18:27:06 GMT
References: <141212@pyramid.pyramid.com>
Organization: Pyramid Technology Corp., Mountain View, CA
Lines: 22

Prices for Blue Books vary a lot; United Nations Bookshop is a good 20%
cheaper than Omnicom, and gives much better service, IMHO. ISO documents can
be had for free when they are in the Draft stage, *if* you know the right
people at NIST or ANSI. After that, ANSI gives exclusive selling rights to
Omnicom, who charges whatever they think they can get away with. (The docs I
have gotten straight from NIST were of excellent reproduction quality, and
were shipped promptly. From Omnicom the quality is highly variable, and the
service mediocre. They also appear to exhaust their supplies of out-dated
drafts before sending current ones.)

>I had an advert that claimed to have all of the 1988 OSI, ANSI, CCITT, and
>a couple other data comm standards available for only $750.00.

That sounds like the McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Datacommunications Standards,
4th Edition. It is a six volume set, and includes many of the most relevant
standards, but is by no means exhaustive. (The Blue Books alone are about four
times the size of the McGraw-Hill set, but have a lot of drek in them that
most datacomm developers don't care about.) We have the 3rd edition, which
contains the '84 standards, and have been very pleased with it; the editors
did a very good job of selecting the most relevant documents.

<csg>