From: ejh@khonshu.colorado.edu (Edward J. Hartnett) Subject: Re: Suggestions for the free Unix projects Date: 12 Oct 1992 09:53:59
In article <1992Oct12.042518.19839@serveme.chi.il.us> joeg@gagme.chi.il.us (joe grosch) writes:
I recently spoke to the owner of Walnut Creek CD on the phone. His
company is distributing a CD of the GNU and X source code. He charges $40.00
for this CD. The company I am contracting for is interested in distributing
a product on CD and I was researching costs. The owner of Walnut Creek CD
quoted figures very simular to the above figures, execpt he indicated that
a number of the larger pressing plants will take a tar of the data on
8mm and do the mastering for you. If I remember right he said the mastering
charge was $200.00 or $300.00. That is a lot less than buying your own
mastering system at ~$20,000.00 a pop.
I only followed this thread sporatically. Did someone suggest that you
have to buy a mastering system? That's crazy. I recently (two years
ago) produced a CD of meteorological data for a research project I was
working on. I can't remember the exact costs, but they were quite
reasonable. I think I bought a trial version of the CD (pre-master I
think they called it) for $500. Plus maybe another $300 processing
cost. After getting the trial version and making a bunch of changes, I
had 150 copies made for two or three bucks a copy. I think we charged
people $35, which mostly covered all costs (including documentation of
microfische). Of course, we weren't trying to make a profit, or even
necessarily cover costs totally either, we had funding for this stuff.
I sent the CO ROM people my data on 6250 bpi 9-track mag tapes, in tar
format. I got the very strong impression that they could handle pretty
much any media. In fact, I think the guy mentioned that a lot of
people sent in a hard drive with the data, and that was the easiest of
all. So it's quite easy to get the CD made. (Of course, it's a little
more difficult to ensure there are no mistakes on it! As someone else
pointed out, it can be a lot of work, and that cost money too.)