OED
6 messages in this thread
Or look at it this way, If we list the OED at $950, and plan on sales of
5,000, we can figure that the retailers are going to stay out of it. Who
is going to stock something at that price that only the library is going to
buy? So virtually all sales are going to be "direct from the publisher."
Gross sales would be $4.75 million, publisher take all. Keep the "Rolls
Royce," image and drive around in one too.
Or, list the OED at $400, plan on sales of 20,000 copies. Still an
expensive item for my corner bookshop. So we can figure that a lot of
retailers are still going to be shy about it. If half our sales are mail
order, direct from the publisher, and the other half are sales through
retailers who keep half, then we gross $6 million. Skip the Rolls Royce
image, just drive one, and keep a spare in the garage, (in case we need to
cut a deal with a used car salesman in LA.)
Allen – yup, you can play the numbers a lot of ways. In some ways the OED
situation resembles what happened with wristwatches back in the early 1980s.
The Swiss did not believe in quartz-driven electronics – in their minds,
watches were handmade, precision jewelry which was fairly accurate and high
priced.
Although the first quartz movement was produced in Switzerland, no one in the
industry there saw its potential. It took the Japanese to build the automated
production lines and produce mass market, highly accurate quartz digital and
analog watches and sell them to the world. Within five years Hong Kong was
the world's largest watch producer by volume; Japan the largest by value; and
the two largest Swiss manufacturing groups were in Central Bank receivership.
The Swiss came out of that debacle mostly because an outsider, marketing
specialist, was brought in by the government to head the combined company
formed from the two bankrupt groups; he pushed the "Swatch" watch line, which
sold cheaply, and outsold the Asian products. It combined excellent design
and quality with very good marketing.
I think OUP needs to take a similar tack – treat the CD version of the OED as
the "Swatch" and market it to the masses at an aggressive price; leave the
print version as the Longines/Omega/Rado (three of the higher priced brands
of the groups which went belly-up in Switzerland), selling at a higher price
in fancy, hand-tooled and gold-embossed leather bindings to those who want to
decorate their bookshelves.
Regds Ric
Ric, since the OED is published by a University and a University's primary
purpose is to educate it seems to me that they could educate more people by
selling the EOD in high volume at a low price. They would most likely end
up with a larger return on their investment. Some of this money could be
invested in improving on the work by enhancing their retreval software,
adding illustrations, etc. In fact the profits could be used to reduce the
price of the print edition. Even a reduction to $400 would be
prohibitively expensive for most people. The street price on Microsoft
Bookshelf is $130 and I think the OED would sell better if it was priced at
$80 to $100 dollars. I think most people are unaware of the contents of
the OED and would think of it as an expensive dictionary. They are pricing
it above the price of a good CD-ROM encyclopedia (Compton's).
Bruce – no argument here. However, as I understand it Oxford University Press
is pretty much of a commercial offshoot of Oxford University and I suspect
their mission is profit, if only to feed back into the university.
But, yes, I think pricing in the MS Bookshelf area would make for pretty
spectacular sales volumes. Right now, the markups on CD-ROMS are pretty
spectacular. Since we all got into this discussion, I have been doing some
research and have managed to come up with some "interesting" figures:
The Guiness World Records disk lists at $395; it is sold at wholesale at just
under $100; and dealers can purchase quantity at under $80. Comptons lists at
$695, wholesale > $400, dealer > $380. MS Bookshelf $295, > $150, > $115.
North American Fax Book $495, > $100, > $55. PC SIG #8: $495, > $60, > $45.
Interestingly, the "dealer" prices listed above are charged by a "middleman"
and are not the prices charged by the publisher. So publisher prices must be
lower yet. So, if you buy say the Guiness disk at list from a "dealer" you
are paying pretty close to four times what he paid and he has a 400% markup!
I could not get the numbers on the OED, but the above (and another 100 or so
which I looked at) suggest there may well be a very large markup involved
there, too. Anyone from the Bureau of Electronic Publishing care to comment?
Ric
Richard,
The actual _Manufacturing_ cost on a disk is about $2500 for the
first disk, and maybe $2.50 for the second and further copies. (This is a
conservative, fully loaded number including inserts, jewel boxes, silk
screen etc.)
The real cost is in preparing the tape that was used to cut the
first disk. Even a small, text only database like ours (150 meg of New
Hampshire legal stuff) represents tens of thousands of dollars of data
conversion. So the ability to cut price is certainly there, if and only if
it will get more sales to cover that horrible fixed cost.
Frank
Yes, but IBM paid OUP to do the conversion, so they don't have any front
end costs for the CDROM prior to production.
I'll not only pay the 895 it will actually cost, but get a CDROM player to
do it; but I think it's disgraceful exploitation of the market and it's a
price that will wipe me out from e.g., any holiday this year (by my alma
mater, incidentally.)