Katydid CD ROM

[christian thompson]

What is a reasonable price? I do not know. That is a really a question for the community. But as I have just issued a CD-ROM, let me add some data to the discussion.

1) Yes, there is always the cost we, SCIENTISTs, devote to our work. Unfortunately we are not rock stars, etc., and will never be properly compensated for that work.

2) Therefore, our goal (North American Dipterists Society) is to get information out to our users as cheaply as possible, etc.  So, NADS is only looking for sufficient return on its production costs to be able to produce more Diptera Data Dissemination Disks. 

3) our costs for production were $3,613 for 1,000 disk, that includes the Jewel case, printed booklet ($1,010 for the booklet printing), packing, shrinkwrap, etc.

4) Hence, we have decided to print the journal at $20 per volume. And a special offer of 2 years for 1 to get started. I am figuring on the Bill Gates approach; sell cheap and sell often. Get them to buy a disk every year and the Diptera community will have a cheap way to get lots of information out to ALL.

5) AND MOST IMPORTANTLY, the DDDD is a permanent record of the ephemeral information which is available on the WWW. It is a SCIENTIFIC publication under the current ICZN and will be under the future version.

Piotr & Dan are right on: CDROM is cheap, but effective way to get lots of information out to users. The real question is how to price these disks. As one interested in flies, I not really interested in grasshoppers, not enough to pay $95. But I am very much interested in how Piotr & Dan put all this together (did they use FileMakerPro run-time databases?) So, I would be happy to pay $20 just to figure out their tricks of the trade. On the other hand, I will NEVER pay $300 that ETI is charging for the John Noyes' Chalcid wasp CD. That's is overpriced. 


F. Christian Thompson
Systematic Entomology Lab., USDA
Smithsonian Institution
Washington, D. C. 20560
(202) 382-1800 voice
(202) 786-9422 FAX
cthompso at sel.barc.usda.gov