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[John Noyes]

Dear Chris,

So, you think that $300 for the Chalcidoidea CDrom is overpriced? You are
certainly very wrong on that if you consider that it is the equivalent of
well over 16,000 printed pages of a conventional catalogue and far, far more
useful. It is NOT just a conventional taxonomic catalogue. It might be
better termed an "interactive catalogue and biological database" since apart
from taxonomic information it contains a huge amount of information on
hosts, distribution, ecology, biology, etc., etc. and also a bibliography of
more than 35,000 references which represents more than 90% of the litature
ever written on chalcidoids. Many commercially produced taxonomic
revisions/catalogues of more than 500 pages are more than $200-250 each
which would make this particular CDrom, even at $300, incredibly cheap at
the price. I also think that you are being a little unfair on ETI, since
they had the cost of actually supporting development of Dicky Yu's TAXA
system for use on the CDrom as well as other production and post-sales
support costs on top of the hardware costs (CD's and booklets).

A few other things crossed my mind on pricing of CDrom's and Chris's comment
that the Chalcidoidea CDrom is too expensive. The reaction of at least one
other TAXACOM subscriber (Mary Barkworth) indicates that $95 for the
tettigoniid CDrom is very reasonable. Consider then that as a group, the
Chalcidoidea is about 3.5X the size of the bush crickets. That would make
$300 for the Chalcidoidea CDrom also very reasonable. Further to this, I do
not know what the coverage of each CDrom will be be that will be produced by
NADS. For instance if each CDrom covers on average one superfamily of
Diptera in North America. There are more than 20 superfamilies of Diptera
recognised in the USA and about 20,000 species. Thus if you plan to charge
$20 for each CDrom, then this is far too high in comparison with the $300
for the Chalcidoidea CDrom which covers more than 21,000 species. Just a
thought.

I also believe that in an ideal world taxonomic catalogues should be made
available as hard copy, CDrom and as a web site. Each has distinct
advantages over the others. Hard copy catalogues will certainly be around
for many centuries to come and give a permanent record of the status quo at
the time it was published. On the other hand CDroms give the same permanent
record but will very probably not be readable in 100 years time, either
because the CD's themselves has physically broken down or because technology
will have changed so much that there will simply be not be any  machines
capable of reading them (except perhaps in museums!). Web sites on the other
hand have free access and allow for constant updating, which is great, but
they do not allow the sort of complex searches which can be done on CDroms,
although I believe that should be possible in the next couple of years.

John

At 15:39 14/07/99 +0100, you wrote:
>>Content-Disposition: inline
>>Date:         Wed, 14 Jul 1999 08:53:40 -0400
>>Reply-To:     christian thompson <cthompson at SEL.BARC.USDA.GOV>
>>Sender:       Taxacom Discussion List <TAXACOM at USOBI.ORG>
>>From:         christian thompson <cthompson at SEL.BARC.USDA.GOV>
>>Subject:      Re: Katydid CD ROM
>>To:           TAXACOM at USOBI.ORG
>>
>>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

John S. Noyes, Entomology Department, The Natural History Museum,
South Kensington, London, SW7 5BD, UK
Tel. (From July 5 1999): +44 (0)207-942-5594  Fax: +44 (0)207-942-5229]

INTERNET: jsn at NHM.ac.uk

See info at - http://www.nhm.ac.uk/science/entom/project2/index.html