Wes Crone:

>After reading the posts about the New Groves Opera edition on CD-ROM I
>became very frustrated.  Why do we have to pay so much? The New Groves
>complete volumes costs an arm and a leg.  Bach 2000, well there goes the
>other arm and leg.  CD technology is incredibly cheap to produce and is
>even a very cheap purchase for consumers.  I bought a few hundred CDRs at
>20 cents a pop. With a 650 MB CD capable of holding 6,400 10-page typed
>documents and newer 700MB discs and DVD discs capable of MUCH more storage
>capacity, why do we have to pay hundreds and hundreds of dollars for the
>printed version?
>
>I don't know how many total pages you'll find in the complete New Groves
>but with text and images I can't imagine it being too many CDs worth.
>Heck, even selling the complete volume in a massive CD set for 150 dollars
>would be nice.  But if there's one thing I know about some software
>companies, it's that they slap a high price on popular items.  I don't
>imagine it has much to do with production costs either.  While a title is
>popular it is usually extremely expensive.  Later on, when a 2nd edition
>is released, the original price falls sometimes dramatically.  I have a
>feeling that if the New Groves is released in a multimedia version it will
>be extremely expensive just like the paper version; that is until edition
>two is released.

I completely agree with you that prices for electronic versions of Grove and
other dictionaries often seem prohibitively expensive.  But, I think the one
important aspect to remember is that production costs form a tiny part of
the whole financial equation.  The new edition of Grove was started in
around 1994, since then we've received articles from around 6,000
contributors from all over the world - many of which have required
translation, edited 29,000 articles, spent years ensuring the accuracy and
consistency of every article, set 1000s of music examples and pictures and
checked the entire dictionary twice to ensure there are as few errors of any
kind as possible.  At our peak we were employing over one hundred editors
both in and out of house.  The whole dictionary is over 27,000 pages long in
29 volumes.

If I remember correctly, the last edition of Grove took something like 5
years to break even, let alone make a profit.

I wish it were cheaper to buy - I certainly can't afford to buy it in any
form - but I think you can see why its as much as it is!

Robin Newton
www.robin-newton.co.uk




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