CompuServe Messages

To Doug, Nathan, and Guy, That all sounds good and are definitely good ideas. The problem is primarily still that *everyone* does not acatually have a laptop, in fact nowheres near enough rockhounds/collectors seem to be regular users of computers (as judged by my contacts at the major shows, and my attempts to get articles via disk or online instead of paper copies I need to retype). Even if there were enough rockhound computers out there, there is the problem of getting people to pay the shareware fee. Apparently the statistics are rather dismal for software, and probably would be for books. Guy's suggestion of having some sort of abridged version online/downloadable and getting the full version on disk when the fee is paid would be good. In fact I will consider testing the idea. Definitely, it would be so much cheaper to produce a book on disk/online. Although the download fee could be high for a book of any lenght, especially with photos. Disk yes, could get a lot of text on a text and quite a lot of B&W illustrations (and compacted color?). A CD-ROM would of course make almost anything possible. The cost of publishing a book on disk would be cheap, real cheap. In fact, the actual "publishing" cost would be nearly zero. Generally, personally, I am not sold on having most books on disc (I have a small sampling of CD-ROMs now and find them only handy for the amount of color photos and for extensive data, not convenient as a book). Also, I stopped uploading the Mineral News to CIS and have not heard from anyone asking "where are they?" Did anyone even notice? Did anyone even read the first three? Jon Gladwell will probably be a dealer at the FM Symposium in Tacoma, WA in a week and a half from now. I will ask him his thoughts and suggest that he consider uploading Vol. 3 of his guide. BTW he is on AOL now, so he does have a modem. Lanny