🚀 go-pugleaf

>> How much can they possibly be making on reprints of this stuff? This
>> ain't exactly NY Times booklist stuff.
>> 
>
>The aim is not to make money, it is just to cover the cost of production and
>distribution.
>
>Herman Silbiger

I did not mean to imply that they were profitting off this activity
(or, better put, "I did not mean to imply that they were not
profitting..."), I was asking whether they really could be covering
any significant costs in this manner. I suppose one could always argue
that they're at least losing less.

But simply producing and shipping paper copies tends to have a high
overhead, particularly the labor involved (it takes real staff to
track something down, make copies, pack, mail etc.) It's not hard to
come out net negative merely on the activity of selling copies of
documents. Or, perhaps, only cover the cost of distributing the copies.

If that's the case, then why not just distribute it electronically and
get rid of most of the overhead?

And electronic copies don't eliminate sales, they might drive them in
other directions. For example, Unix manuals have been on-line since
the beginning of Unix, yet I don't think anyone doubts there's a brisk
business in paper Unix documentation.

USENIX alone has sold, I dunno, hundreds if not thousands of BSD Unix
manuals (basically just hard copy of what's on-line) over the years,
mostly to people who also had access to exactly the same thing
on-line.

It's not an either/or proposition. What happens is that availability
of the documents on-line gets people using the information, exploring
it.

It widens the audience vastly when, eg, every CS dept has an
electronic copy of (say) OSI docs. Right now I bet very few people in
CS depts in the US have ever even seen one of these documents, let
alone come to depend on them as a reference base. I know in the 10
years I spent at Boston University I never saw one around. What I have
I had to hunt down and order (and yes, had to work hard to learn what
to even ask for!)

I think the standards organizations are being foolish on this point.
-- 
        -Barry Shein

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