Katydid CD ROM, costs, design

[Piotr Naskrecki]

Dear Christian,

I am not sure if Taxacom is the right place to start a public discussion
on prices, costs and all that. But you did mentioned several important
points.

>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.
Of course we are not rock stars but this is not the reason why we
shouldn't be properly compensated. Why shouldn't we expect a rich mining
company who needs a bio-assesment service to pay what we are worth for
our services? Or why is it OK for a university library to pay $300 for a
book on pharmaceutics but not on insects? I think that our problem as the
taxonomic community is that we are all too eager to sell ourselves cheap,
assuming that nobody is going to pay us anything. Wrong - our work is as
important as that of other consulting services and we should be fully
aware of that. As most of you know, some institutions (e.g., ANIC in
Canberra or the Natural History Museum in London) are already charging a
lot of money for their identification and consulting services.

>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.
All we want is the return of about a half of our production costs. Based
on sales of recent publications on Orthoptera published by the Society,
we estimated that we probably will not be able to sell more than 100-150
copies. If we wanted to actually make money on this CD, it would have to
cost about $300.


>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.
Our production costs, in addition to making the disks, also included
developing and scanning a few hundreds rolls of slides (this technology
was later replaced by a more efficient digital camera, which also wasn't
free), several major trips to museums (various places in the US, London,
Vienna, Amsterdam, Canberra, and a few more; some of them were covered by
our grant but some were not) as well as the cost of developing the
software. By the way, who made those disks for you, seems awfully
expensive? We used Catalogic, a very good company from California.


>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.
I guess we decided on the Steve Jobs approach - sell few but of superb
quality and with everything included. I think that in the long run that's
a much better approach.


>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.
Yes, a CD is a scientific publication. In case somebody doubts that, we
even included a statement on the CD cover saying that this publication
fulfills all requirements of the Article 8 of the 3rd edition of the Code
etc.


>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.
Sorry Christian, our design is copyrighted. You would have to pay a bit
more than $20 to be able to use it.

Sincerely,
Piotr Naskrecki

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Piotr Naskrecki
Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
University of Connecticut, Storrs CT 06269, USA

e-mail: pin93001 at uconnvm.uconn.edu

An Illustrated Catalog of Orthoptera (http://viceroy.eeb.uconn.edu/cd) -
a database of the Orthoptera of the World on a CD ROM

Orthoptera Species File Online (http://viceroy.eeb.uconn.edu/Orthoptera)
- a database of the Orthoptera of the World Online

Katydids of La Selva Biological Station Costa Rica
(http://viceroy.eeb.uconn.edu/interkey/titlepg)

Taxonomy and Collection Manager software
(http://viceroy.eeb.uconn.edu/interkey/database.html)