🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <3447@pt.cs.cmu.edu> ns@cat.cmu.edu (Nicholas Spies) writes:
>In article <5772@hoptoad.uucp> tim@hoptoad.UUCP (Tim Maroney) writes:
>>...
>>And according to this estimate, a Next disk will hold 671 books at 256M.
>
>At $40/book that's $26,840.00 + $50.00 for the disc itself. Just the
>author's royalties, figured at 15%, would make the disc cost $4,026 (after
>all, why should the authors take a loss?). Therein lies the problem of very
>dense media.

Yep.  All I was talking about was how many would fit.  Whether it could
ever be economically feasible to publish such a disk is another matter
entirely.  Even with public domain books, the costs of scanning and
character-recognizing are pretty large.  I made some estimates a few
months ago, but I don't know where they've gotten to now, I'm afraid.
Let's see, if it takes about two minutes to scan and convert a page,
and the average book has 250 pages, then that's 500 minutes or over 8
hours per book -- let's say ten hours to be conservative.  So it would
take 6710 hours or about three and a third work years to scan in 671
books.  And I think my two minutes a page estimate may be optimistic,
not to mention extra costs for indexing and mastering.  Not a basement
project, I'm afraid.
-- 
Tim Maroney, Consultant, Eclectic Software, sun!hoptoad!tim
This message does represent the views of Eclectic Software.