MARKETING

The CD-ROM is a publication, so we want to distribute it to our sponsors and also the public. Ideally, distribution to the public should pay for itself. But there are some special pricing problems with this publication. The manufacturing economics of CD-ROM is roughly this: the first one (the master) costs about a thousand dollars and after that they cost less than two dollars each. (It costs another dollar for the paper booklet). We can't predict how many will be distributed as a function of price. Historically, there have always been reasons for academics to subsidize their publications, and that seems especially the case here because the CD-ROM has little public acceptance yet. If we charge people $25 for the CD-ROM, then they have a right to expect it to work on their equipment, and we can't manage guarantees or consulting services. I have a magazine ``Classical CD'' with a CD attached to the cover. Perhaps we can plan on a mailing with such journals as Geophysics. This seems especially likely as we acquire more documents and the number of useable platforms grows. Meanwhile, Stanford University Press has agreed to sell CD-ROM copies of my book from our inventory at a modest price, while recognizing that I plan distribute as many free (or nearly free) copies as I can.

We hold no hostility to people who charge money for their software, indeed we like to purchase good software. But an unescapable consequence of publication via CD-ROM is that the author cannot use proprietary software that most readers might not have. When I applied this realization to my book, I found that I am using ratfor and newawk. Since then I adapted to public domain ratfor and converted essential functions from newawk to old awk which is standard on UNIX systems.