tim@hoptoad.uucp (Tim Maroney) (10/30/88)
In article <3447@pt.cs.cmu.edu> ns@cat.cmu.edu (Nicholas Spies) writes: >In article <5772@hoptoad.uucp> tim@hoptoad.UUCP (Tim Maroney) writes: >>... >>And according to this estimate, a Next disk will hold 671 books at 256M. > >At $40/book that's $26,840.00 + $50.00 for the disc itself. Just the >author's royalties, figured at 15%, would make the disc cost $4,026 (after >all, why should the authors take a loss?). Therein lies the problem of very >dense media. Yep. All I was talking about was how many would fit. Whether it could ever be economically feasible to publish such a disk is another matter entirely. Even with public domain books, the costs of scanning and character-recognizing are pretty large. I made some estimates a few months ago, but I don't know where they've gotten to now, I'm afraid. Let's see, if it takes about two minutes to scan and convert a page, and the average book has 250 pages, then that's 500 minutes or over 8 hours per book -- let's say ten hours to be conservative. So it would take 6710 hours or about three and a third work years to scan in 671 books. And I think my two minutes a page estimate may be optimistic, not to mention extra costs for indexing and mastering. Not a basement project, I'm afraid. -- Tim Maroney, Consultant, Eclectic Software, sun!hoptoad!tim This message does represent the views of Eclectic Software.