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Re: Oxford UP DSS CD-ROM

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>Marcus Wood wrote
>
>>I too heard of a CD-Rom edition of the scrolls and heard the price 2,500
>>pounds bandied around. I switched off at that moment.

Given that the costs for physically producing a CD-ROM these days is as low
as a buck a piece, we can be sure that £2,500 is not all production costs.
The cost is so outlandishly high that I can't imagine any individual buying
it, but then again they manufacturers are not aiming to sell to individuals
-- merely to libraries.

As to wonderful searching capabilities, a company can buy a licence to use
someone else's add-in search software and pay a global fee which might
perhaps cost the end user one buck.

Marvelous photography, necessary in this situation doesn't make up for the
rest of the £2,500. Gosh a zoom. Photo-CD which any sensible CD-ROM designer
uses for photographic storage comes direct from Kodak with 5 sizes per photo
at a cost of 100,000 lire italiano, much less than $100 for 100 photos. But
are they new photos, or have they too been licenced? (A zoom in this case
incidentally is just the use of a reference photo to access part of another
that has a much higher resolution.)

I guess the rest is in the treatment -- which sounds less than standard fare
for a normal multimedia production. How can Oxford/Brill justify the cost?
They'll swear that it's specialist material that they can't hope to sell to
a more general user-base, so in the nobility of their hearts, they'll
produce it at least so that it has been made available for scholarly pursuits.

At a tenth of the price how many would buy it? I guess that's a moot point
-- the libraries will at £2,500. If you wanna see it, make sure your library
gets it. Or perhaps you'll get the opportunity to take the path of one of
our readers who got it on loan from the manufacturer.

Your multimedia correspondent,

Ian Hutchesson