Robin Newton wrote:

>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.  ...  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.

If that figure is correct, and I do not doubt that it is, then I
underestimated the production costs dramatically.  Another poster relied
with a similar message about the production costs and while I had figured
some costs into the overall cost of releasing the set I never estimated it
to be so high.  I would like to say that once a printed version has been
completed it should only be a matter of transforming the volumes into ones
and zeros.  High end scanners could very easily scan text very quickly and
images also quickly.  Now that that product is complete in printed form the
costs of creating a complete reproduction on CD-ROM should be a very minor
challenge compared with the initial task of obtaining and translating all
the information.  I don't expect production costs would be too astounding.

Wes Crone