Ray Bayles:

>A 24 hour trial is not much of a trial...  and why 30 days for institutions
>and only 24 hours for individuals.

24 hours is pretty stingy all right, but have you ever tried to coordinate
an institution's decision-making process?

>Grove is going to find out that the digital age is here, and that they can
>put that entire dictionary on a CD-ROM for 85 cents and sell it for under
>$50 and still make a lot of money.

I expect they will make a lot of money their way--they surely hope to,
anyway--and I do not wish to defend their price.  But even if they were
not-for-profit I don't think they'd want you doing their cost analysis for
them.  Years of editorial, overhead, promotional and production costs, as
well as a calculation of how many opera lovers are in their market, go into
the price, which brings it a lot higher than the per unit stamping cost you
seem to reduce the whole thing to, but which comes on top of everything
else.

The part of the deal that bothers me, and my job includes buying this sort
of online publication for an institution, is the prospect of paying for
basically the same thing on a continuing subscription basis, year after
year, with mostly the same content each subsequent year.

Jim Tobin