CompuServe Thread

I tried to reach you earlier this week by phone, but your schedule seemed to be about as busy as mine is. So I'll upload this message, which I think will get quicker results. I want to ask for some information about cd-rom retrieval and indexing software. First, the background. My company does electronic publishing; we drecently did a very large encyclopedia for a major publisher on the east coast. Now this client wawants to port this title, and others behind it, to cd-rom, and since we have considerable expertise already on this book and others they've done, they want us to do it. That's fine, since we had already more or leless decided we wanted to go into the cd-rom market anyway. For the past three months I've been reading intensively in this area, collecting information, and talking to vendors. I now understand the back end of the process pretty well, I think: we have selected a vendor for replication and packaging, we bought a Philips CDD-521 at dealer's price, and we selected premastering and mastering software. All fine: this part of the process seems pretty straightforward to me, and in many respects it's rather like pressing a record used to be: from the master one makes the ccopies. The questions now concern the retrieval software. I have now read every- thing on this forum as of last week, and talked to several vendors. Your list of Retrieval and Indexing Vendors was helpful initially, but I soon learned that it would be much MORE helpful for companies coming into this mmarket if it provided additional information about pricing categories, or at least if it provided categories based on pricing strategies without actulaly mentioning $$. I can very well understand your position as an industry association, but consider: some of these vendors target major corporations almost exclusively, either explicitly or implicitly, by imposing pricing strategies such as, e.g., Dataware's, namely $30,000 for the software, royalties of approx. $100 per disk cut. That's all well and good for Homeywell; they'll save enough in mailing costs alone in one year to offset those costs ten to one. But for vendors who hope to put cd disks into the marketplace retailing for, say, $100 to $200, a $100 royalty base is out of the question. So, unless one is willing to call every one of the approximately 30 to 40 vendors on the OPA list of Retrieval and Indexing Software Vendors, one has no idea which oones are charging, say, $5000 and no royalties for their software and which ones six times that figure plus royalties. Do not misunderstand meme: I have no objection to companies like Dataware targeting markets; it's just that their market isn't ours. SO: my question: could you recommend to me a short list of say five to ten vendors whose pricing schemes are in the lower third of the scale? The book we intend to port to cd-rom is text only, no graphics at all, and and runs to about 1500 pages or 1.5 million words in print form. We need software that is basically hypertext retrieval and indexing–pretty straightforward.