#OED
21 messages in this thread
Frank
Frank & Lisa:
I am getting the point now. I have gotten so used to paying $10 to
$25 for high quality paperbacks, and $45 to $75 for good hardbound books,
and even more for books with good quality reproductions of artwork, that I
had assumed that it cost a lot of money to print and ship the things.
Mac-World had a article a month or two ago about the cost of producing
CD-ROMS. Having gotten used to paying $9 to $17 for recorded music on CD,
and looked at the cost of CD-ROM disks, I was shocked to find out that once
a master recording is produced, and a master CD is produced, (for about
$1,000,) the individual CD's are stamped out and put in those little
plastic boxes with the printed inserts for under $2 each! And that is with
a production run as small as 1000 CD's! When you think of a hit album on
CD, that sells a million copies at $15 each, you are thinking of 13 million
greenbacks to spread around.
Even a classical recording, something obscure, say, the Amsterdam
Guitar trio, who might sell 20,000 copies of their latest, (and truly
sublime) transcription of the Brandenburg Concertos. If they retail at $14
each, you are talking sales of $239,000 above production costs. So if the
retailers take half, you still have $119.500 to distribute the thing, and
pay yourself. There be money in those silver discs.,
Unfortunately, for some of the really specialized refernce works, 20,000
sales is an impossible dream. For our disk of New Hampshire legal stuff it
would be 100% market penetration–not only every lawyer in New Hampshire
but also every Law School in the US and most of the giant New York and
Boston law firms as well. And then we _might_ hit 20,000.
Wherefore we have to price to get our development money back on a
few hundred sales.
Frank
Yup, I'd certainly buy it at US$80. I might even consider writing some
additional software to make 'browsing' more fun.
Hmmmm…! Lets see, if we "list" the OED at $400 and sell 20,000 copies and
get to keep 50 percent after the retailers have had their bite, then subtract
our production costs … well, gee, we've not quite made $4-million.
On the other hand, we could list it at $950, figure on selling maybe 5,000
copies to the "must have" library crowd … heck, we'd make around
$2.3-million and we would not lose our "Rolls Royce" image. Of course, we
British never were driven by the profit motive – too demeaning – that's what
used car salesmen in L.A. are driven by, no?
Regds Ric
I feel the to OED has the potential to be as big a seller as Microsoft
Bookshelf. If you listed the disk at $80 I'm sure you could sell well over
100,000 copies, because even occasional dictionary users would buy it just
to have the ultimate in dictionaries. Yearly updates could be provided and
you could make more money on support software like on-line spelling
checkers. This lower price would allow a lot more people to benefit from
your research and I believe that your contributers want the maximum number
of people to benefit from their efforts. It is not even possible to
receive a decent discount on the current product. Please reconsider the
price of the new OED!
Thank you.
Sincerely
Bruce P. De Vries
Public libraries are being faced with ever decreasing budgets and many will
not be able to afford the OED CD-ROM, plus the drive and computer needed to
access it. I'm sure there are 5000 libriary that will order it though, but
you could be in a lot more places if the price was lower.
Bruce — missed a couple of days on CIS due to work pressures, so sorry for
the delayed reply.
>> If you listed the disk at $80 …
I don't sell it! I'm one of the very many potential buyers out there who
(like you from the sound of your message) would dearly love to see OUP wake
up and sell the disk at a more realistic price!
Yes (to your PS), libraries are facing budget problems. I did a little
"freebie" consulting with an American graduate school who wanted to automate
their library system last year and it was very clear they were doing some
hard thinking about what they purchased and what it cost. The problem, for
now at least, is there is no real alternative (read: competition) for the
OED, and so OUP can get away with that incredible price.
Regds Ric
Sorry, Ric the way your were talking I thought you were an employee of the
publisher. I wonder if they read this conference.
No problem, Bruce. I spent a lot of years in (print, mainly) publishing, and
have some idea of the underlying costs of getting information onto bound
sheets of paper. Somehow doubt OUP read this forum, but we can always hope!
Maybe someone from one of the resellers here (Bureau, DAK?) might "clip" some
of this thread and pass it along …
Regds Ric
Rather than hoping they will read it we could mail it to them ourselves.
Does anyone have an address for the publisher of OED?
Bruce – For a great many years, their address was simply Oxford University
Press, Ely House, London W.1, England. However, that adress is maybe 18
years old (I don't throw away old address books <g>), so may well have
changed.
Perhaps someone else on this forum has a reasonably current Oxford dictionary
– should have the publisher's address in it.
If anyone has a more reliable address than the one I have, I would be happy
to dump a copy of this thread to paper and mail it to them with a cover note.
Ric
I have a compact edition O.E.D. published in 1982. In it they list
their address as Oxford University Press Walton Street, Oxford OX26DP. If
any of the Oxford folks check out CServe, I'll add my two cents to say that
I would buy it on cd-rom for under $200 (and that's only because I love it
so much), more than that and it remains in the hands of the institutions
and the fabulously wealthy.
Mark – thanks for the address. Looks like they have been moving about. I just
got the New York office address from Bill, so will go with that for now.
Regds Ric
Richard: are you aware if there is a new CD version of the OED coming out
soon? I plan to buy one shortly. By the way, if the price were $400 I would
buy two. –Bill
Bill — yes, I know a new version is coming out. What I am praying for, is
more realistic pricing from OUP. At $400 I would be a definite buyer; at $800
or more, it becomes a "do I really need this?" product and I will think long
and hard about what else I might do with that money.
As others have said in this thread, I think there is a large – probably very
large – potential market for OED priced much lower than it is now. Friends at
Sony in Japan told me years ago, when they were first geting into video
recorders (remember the old BetaMax?) that they had calculated the mass market
for electronic products began around the $400 mark; above that, techno-buffs
and the I-must-have-this-first crowd would pay the price, but represented a
small market which was not too profitable. So, Sony's early push (matched by
the VHS inventors JVC, and their parent Matsushita) was to find engineering
solutions to bring the retail price to the $400 and under level. If you go
back today and graph price against sales volume, you will see the video
recorder market "exploded" after prices dropped under $400. More recently, a
Japanese business friend told me he thought maybe the threshold had shifted
up a little, toward $500, but that he thought inflation since the mid-70's
had not really had much impact on consumer thinking in this (price) area.
This seems to me to hold true when you look at the prices of most major
software packages: WordPerfect, 1-2-3 et al list around $500 but are commonly
sold at prices under $400…
Oh well, we can just hope someone with influence at OUP wakes up to the
market they are missing…
Regds Ric
Certainly agree Ric. And remember they have no real concern about piracy of
CDs. A $500 price would be acceptable to most people who could use the OED.
Keeps the price of the drive and software under a thousand. –Bill
Richard,
Don't forget that it is possible to charge more to "commercial" users, such
as libraries, than to individuals. Have your cake….
robin
Yes, many companies do charge more to commercial users. But, in these
recessionary times, I suspect more commercial users are becoming a lot more
aware of those prices and the alternatives which are often available. You
only have to look at the growth of mail-order sales of PCs to corporations
who a few years ago would have bought Big Blue only …
When I lived and worked in Hong Kong, we took a look at what we were paying
for PC software (and what we were getting) and found it significantly less
expensive to buy from US mail-order vendors; our local "authorized"
distributors sold at prices typically 20 to 50 percent over US list and
provided none of the after-sales support you would expect in the US from
outfits like WordPerfect. Those same pricing policies, presumably sanctioned
by WordPerfect, Lotus et al, also contributed to lots of piracy problems.
Regds Ric
Ric,
I guess your are suggesting that the libraries would pretend that they are
single users, and order OED at the reduced price. Perhaps, but, being public
institutions, I feel that they would be unlikely to violate their license
(which would, of course, be different for libraries than individuals). Any
library user could turn them in.
robin
Robin – no, I don't think libraries would violate their licenses; I do think
they would tend to seek out vendors (eg, Bureau of Electronic Publishing) who
might be able to offer lower prices than "publisher direct."
There is a real problem with many of those "licenses" however, and that
relates to LAN usage. If a library has a CD-ROM on a LAN, how is it charged?
How do you differentiate multiple accesses by one user in one session from
multiple users? Jim Seymour has, IMHO, a very good article on
Windows-LAN-software pricing in the May 12 issue of PC Magazine; CD-ROMs and
ever-faster jukeboxes may be a bigger problem yet: libraries are going to
want to network and jukebox their ROMS because having one ROM player per
terminal will make no financial sense at all. I don't know how/if this is
billed right now, but I do see it as an "issue" for CD-ROM publishers and
their pricing.
Regds Ric
Robin,
>> commercial users
That seems to be the problem with practically everything. If the customer
is a company, then the price doesn't really seem to matter too much as they
can always claim it back as a business expense.
Adrian
Adrian,
Depends on the size of the company. Sure we can claim it back as a
business expense (we don't pay taxes on it), but I'd rather be able to
write paychecks.