#CD-ROM Changer
8 messages in this thread
Rich,
It's true that the cost of print/paper has basically gone away, but
the editing/prepress costs are still there. And pretty similar between
CDROM and paper. For our fairly low volume disk, the price stays high
because a few hundred (total market maybe 2000) customers have to cover the
cost of data prep on a couple hundred volumes of law. Even with simple
formatting and lots of automation we're talking a lot of person days.
BTW, I don't think hard disks are a good analogy to floppies. I'm
pretty sure that a 65 millisecond 20 meg drive would be $100 or less these
days if it weren't for the fact that end users choose the best disk they
can get for $200 rather than the cheapest 20 megger they can get.
Frank
Frank:
Certainly you are right about the production costs. In fact, it might be
interesting to look at the comparison of where dollars go in the
book-making process vs CDROM-making process. Publishers are accustommed to
paying authors very little, and spending a lot on actually making the book.
In the electronic environment there's a switch: Much more time and effort
and cost must go into the factors you describe (and even more so in a
multimedia product), while the cost of actually making the saleable
commodity has gone way down (not counting packaging, documentation etc).
This may be one reason why the traditional book publishers have been
relatively slow to embrace electronic delivery. They have to overcome
those models and traditions. While wily entrepreneurs have moved in to
learn the business from scratch, and are not threatened by the prospects of
a drastic change throughout a large publishing organization.
Rich
Rich,
We do data capture for the print industry as well, and I belong to an
orginazation that runs its own small press, so I have some idea of
costs/efforts on that side as well. (Obviously I'm only addressing text
concerns here, with illustrations/images, but not real multimedia)
Cost per K of data capture is about the same (we charge about a
buck/thousand bytes, proofed and tagged). Tagging for a typesetter vs a
retrieval engine is about the same level of effort. Novels runs3-500,000
bytes, a reference book something over a million. OTOH, CDROM _updates_
seem to run about 10 times that–3 to 10 million bytes added or seriously
changed.
Design seems to be a similar effort per "work" several days to mess
with typefaces, chapter headings, indexes, SGML markups, book sizes,
hypertext jump tags, and so forth. I would also say that jacket copy is
pretty similar except that a book doesn't need a user's manual<g>.
Mastering the CDROM is a one time charge vs. a per page cost for
making printing plates. Breakeven seems to be around 200 pages, and as we
all know per copy cost is much lower for the CDROM.
One statement of yours I would like to clarify however is author's
revenues: Authors certainly get (or could get) a bigger chunk of gross
revenues, but there's so freaking much more on a CDROM (half a million
standard pages is a _lot_ of novels) that the amount paid in royalties per
megabyte-copy will probably be lower. Whether this helps a particular
author seems situation dependant–If I buy the complete works of Edward
Veeblefester rather than just the 2 novels I would buy in paper, he's
probably ahead pretty seriously. OTOH, the author of a single novel
restamped (neologism alert) in "A history of the Detective Story" probably
loses.
Frank
Frank:
This has certainly wandered from the CD Changer topic! But I really
appreciate your comments and perspective. Hopefully, some of the
prospective publishers frequenting the forum will gain some insight from
your experience! And hopefully the non-publishers will also get a better
understanding of what makes CDROM publishing the challenge it is, not just
from a technical perspective, but from a broader business viewpoint as
well!
Rich Bowers
What OCR software do you use?
Do you get to use the XEROX one that costs $250,000 that takes sheets of
paper as input and with 100% OCR outputs a CD-ROM on the other end.
Albert,
Nope we have the Xerox ones that take paper on one end and put out
files that get fixed up by human beings at the other. That takes a 0 off of
the price<g>.
Honestly I wouldn't trust 100% OCR like that, not to mention the
question of reformatting and tagging which is included in our price. I can
see the government doing it, since most of their paper is unreadable
xeroxes of unreadable prose anyway, but I sincerely question a commercial
vendor letting a product out without at least one proofreading somewhere.
Frank
PS the government doesn't pay their bills on time either<re-grin>.
> as we all know per copy cost is much lower for CDROM.
If you are talking about the cost to produce a single copy of a single
book, this is not exactly true. Mass market paperbacks cost as low as $.20
per book. Higher quality paperbacks average about $1.72 per book. The
real advantage to CD-ROM is greater capacity at the same cost. This allows
you to either give the customer more for their money, or more likely, a
higher quality product (color pictures, sound, animation, searching, etc.)
This lets CD-ROMs compete with very high quality books (like art books)
that cost around $10 per book to print.
BTW, the biggest cost to print publishers is returns. Print publishers
take back unsold books for credit against future purchases. This amounts
to 30 –
42% of all books sold by publishers. Any CD-ROM publishers take returns?
Steve,
I sit corrected on the mass market paperback cost. I was figuring
something closer to the $1.72. The las time I saw high volume numbers
CDROMs seemed to asymptotically approach $1.00 as the volume went to
infinity.
As for returns, so far the CDROM market has simply supported a
lively market in remainders. F'rinstance PC Connection is selling a bundle
of 6 back issues of Nautilus, and there's been plenty of talk here about
the cost effectiveness of buying encyclopedias etc. one rev back. I expect
returns will become a problem in a few years though. (I don't expect a
'coverless book' problem though–If I were a publisher I'd tell the dealers
to return the disk and trash the packaging instead of vice versa.)
BTW, could you steer me in the direction of some affordable binding
equipment? I would love to be able to do decent quality (they hold
together) books in onesies at a couple bucks.
Frank