I thought others might be interested in this message I received from
Chris Wren. (Forwarded with permission.)
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Cindy Chick CCHICK@DELPHI.COM
Graham & James (213) 689-6502
801 S. Figueroa, Suite 1400 FAX (213) 623-0960
Los Angeles, CA 90017
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DATE: May 13, 1994
TO: Cindy Chick <CCHICK@DELPHI.COM>
FROM: Chris Wren <CGWREN@ACM.ORG>
RE: Your comment on BNA Environmental Reporter CD ROM
I saw your LAW-LIB comment about the pricing of this CD-ROM
product, and I thought I'd share with you a couple of
observations that I'm sure will not allay your outrage but that
might provide some additional information for evaluating BNA's
pricing -- and perhaps the whole drive toward CD-ROM conversion.
As a preliminary matter, I should say that the BNA's pricing
of its CD-ROM product higher than its comparable print product
doesn't surprise me. I have long doubted the conventional wisdom
that conversion of data from a print format to a CD-ROM format
would result in lower prices, and the BNA example is the third
I've encountered in recent months that reinforces my view.
In January of this year, the Technology Resources Committee of
the State Bar of Wisconsin proposed to the Bar's Board of
Governors that the Bar support a plan to have the state courts
publish an additional official version of Wisconsin appellate
decisions in electronic format, both on a BBS and on CD-ROM.
Wisconsin now has two official reporters in print format, both
published by private-sector publishers -- West Publishing and
Lawyers Cooperative/Callaghan's; the State of Wisconsin does not
publish, in any format, an official version of state courts
decisions, even though the state supreme court's rules allow any
state agency to do so. (The committee's chair has told me that
the committee now overwhelmingly favors replacing the print
versions with a single official publication available only
electronically, not in print, and that the committee will make
this revised proposal to the Board of Governors in June. The
West and Lawyers Cooperative/Callaghan's versions would become
unofficial publications.)
In its resolution, the committee contended that the conversion
would "reduce the cost of legal research by attorneys and the
public." The committee also asserted that the state's
publication of court decisions in electronic formats would
counter the private-sector publishers' policies of pricing their
electronic products in line with their "book prices rather than
to reflect their costs." The committee pointed to the state's
publication of Wisconsin statutes on CD-ROM -- a project also
pushed by the committee several years ago -- as an example of the
benefits publication on CD-ROM would bring to the legal community
and to the public.
In April, a few weeks after I first became aware of the
proposal, my wife, Jill, and I submitted a memo opposing the
committee's proposal. Here's the part of our memo that deals
with the pricing issue:
The committee seeks to buttress its position
. . . with a curious indictment: that the legal
publishers have priced their electronic products
in line with their "book prices rather than to
reflect their costs." Even assuming the committee
has accurate data on the publishers' costs of
producing and distributing their electronic
products (and even assuming further that private-
sector legal publishers have an obligation to
price their products based on costs), Wisconsin's
experience with publishing statutes on CD-ROM D an
experience the committee holds out as its model
for this proposal D suggests the committee has no
cause for complaint on this score. Document Sales
offers a public-domain hardbound version of the
Wisconsin statutes for $95 and a paperbound
version for $84; for updating the bound statutes,
the Senate Chief Clerk sells slip laws on
subscription for $50 per two-year legislative
session. The Chief Clerk also sells the non-
networked CD-ROM version of the statutes for $95
for a single disk or on subscription for $165 for
a two-year legislative session. So, a print
version of Wisconsin statutes kept up-to-date over
a two-year legislative session costs $134 in
paperbound format, $145 in a hardbound format, and
$165 in CD-ROM format.[ * ] If the committee's
claim has merit, the public-sector publisher of
Wisconsin statutes seems to be following a pricing
practice no different from the supposedly
reprehensible ones adopted by private-sector
publishers.
A review in the July 1993 issue of LAW OFFICE
TECHNOLOGY REVIEW of a CD-ROM version of federal
appellate decisions shows a similar pattern even
between competing publishers. The review compared
the cost of West's FEDERAL REPORTER with the cost
of the CD-ROM product published by HyperLaw, a
company not affiliated with West. FEDERAL
REPORTER costs $632.50 per year (based on an
average of 15 print volumes per year at $28.50 per
volume, plus $205.00 for an annual subscription to
the advance sheets). A subscription to four
quarterly discs of the CD-ROM product costs
$650.00. Thus, as with Wisconsin statutes, the
cost of even the least expensive version of this
CD-ROM product exceeded the cost of its closest
print counterpart. The review also noted that
HyperLaw hoped to offer subscriptions for monthly
discs ($1,000 per year) and weekly discs ($2,500
per year). The review indicated that the monthly
disc would probably make the CD-ROM version more
current than the paper advance sheets for West's
reporter. So, to reach with the CD-ROM product
the level of currency now available in West's
print reporter, a lawyer would have to pay
approximately $370 *more* per year for the
electronic format, even though the electronic
publisher has every conceivable incentive to offer
the product at a lower price than the one charged
for the competitor's print version.
[* After submitting this memo to the bar's Board
of Governors, I met with the chair of the
Technology Resources Committee and suggested
that the higher cost of the CD-ROM version
might have resulted in part from the licensing
fee attributable to the use of Folio Views,
the search engine for the CD-ROM version. He
told me that in order to promote Folio Views
as a search engine standard and to get lawyers
used to the search engine, Folio Corporation
had, in effect, granted the Wisconsin agency a
free promotional license for use of Folio
Views with the statutes. So, the price of the
CD-ROM product would probably have been higher
by a few additional dollars if the Folio
engine had been licensed at standard rates
rather than donated as a promotional giveaway.
If you're interested in seeing a copy of
the whole memo and the committee's original
resolution, please let me know and I'll send
you a copy of them.]
In short, regardless of the configuration of the comparison of
print and CD-ROM versions of a publication -- public-sector print
version versus public-sector CD-ROM version [Wisconsin example],
private-sector publisher's print version versus the same
publisher's CD-ROM version [BNA example], or private-sector
publisher's print version versus a competing private-sector
publisher's CD-ROM version [West/HyperLaw example] -- the CD-ROM
version of a publication seems to come out with a higher price
than its print counterpart.
I think this phenomenon results from a characteristic of
CD-ROM publishing that few people realize (or perhaps want to
believe): CD-ROM publishing (or, more generically, electronic
publishing) generally seems to require more work and additional
skills -- and more expensive ones -- compared to print
publishing. I have experimented with Asymetrix ToolBook, a
hypertext authoring program, and have used FrameMaker, a more
conventional desktop publishing program that allows the author to
create both a print-based version and a hypermedia version of a
FrameMaker document. I have found that creating an electronic
version of a document (at least one that includes the kind of
features people expect to find in an electronic document, such as
hypertext links) involves in either system considerably more work
than creating its print counterpart -- and the documents with
which I have experimented do not require, I believe, nearly as
much effort to prepare as the ones most publishers put on their
CD-ROM products.
I suspect that as more customers come to expect (or demand)
more features in electronic products, the cost of such products
will increase further, not go down. The raw cost of the CD-ROM
disk undoubtedly costs less than the raw cost of paper for many
publications, but I feel pretty certain that the additional costs
associated with putting stuff on the disk more than offset the
savings in the costs of the raw materials.
As far as I can remember, the only instances in which I have
seen CD-ROM create a favorable price differential over a
comparable product has occurred when a publisher shifted
distribution of the product from floppy disks to CD-ROM. But
even those instances are rare. More typically, the price remains
the same or goes higher. For example, Borland now offers its C++
programming language on either a CD-ROM or on 3.5" floppy disks,
without any price difference, even though the program in an
earlier, smaller version required (as I recall) about 20 floppy
disks to distribute. (The current version takes up about 64
megabytes of disk space when fully installed.) Borland probably
had lower raw-material costs for the CD-ROM product than for the
floppy-disk version, but I suspect that the additional cost of
re-formatting the installation for the CD-ROM version offset the
lower raw-material cost.
Similarly, I recently received an upgrade offer for
Chessmaster, a computer chess game. The current version comes on
3.5" floppy disks. An *older* version offered in the same
brochure comes on a CD-ROM. The price for the two is the same
(whether at retail price or upgrade price.) I would have
expected the older version to have a lower price, if only by a
few dollars, but that did not occur.
As I said at the top, I doubt my comments have allayed your
outrage, and I'm not happy to be the bearer of what undoubtedly
sounds like dismal news. I think much of the distress many
people feel when they discover that CD-ROM pricing does not come
with dramatically lower costs has resulted both from excessive
hype by vendors with an interest in selling these products and
from a fervent and understandable desire by potential customers
to believe that CD-ROM will solve many problems, including the
cost and storage problems of print publications.
As Jill and I told the Board of Governors in our memo,
"Several years ago, we probably would have shared the committee's
view. But the experience over the past several years of co-
authoring with each other a textbook/reference book on LEXIS and
WESTLAW has led us to conclude that this proposal, like similar
ones elsewhere, rests on shaky foundations." That writing
experience also took me deeper into computer technology than I
ever imagined I would delve, and I came out of it not as a
technophile (which probably would have described, more or less,
my attitude when we started writing the book in 1986) or as a
technophobe, but as a committed technoskeptic.
Since acquiring that viewpoint, nothing about the downside of
the technological revolution has surprised me. For CD-ROM
technology, I think the contrast between hype and reality has
caught quite a few people offguard. When I see that reaction, I
feel grateful that technoskepticism has spared me such
disappointment.
For several months, I have been recommending to friends some
books that I have found helpful in thinking my way through
fundamental questions about technology and the direction it's
going. Although none of the books deals directly with law
libraries or technology's impact on them, I think these books can
help people reconsider, even completely re-frame, the questions
that anyone who must deal with technology has to ask and answer.
On the off chance you might want to see whether these books offer
you anything worthwhile to consider, here's my list:
Donald A. Norman, THINGS THAT MAKE US SMART:
DEFENDING HUMAN ATTRIBUTES IN THE AGE OF THE
MACHINE (1993) -- Norman is widely regarded as a
"founding parent"/guru of the drive for user
friendliness in technology (what Norman calls
"user-centered system design").
Donald A. Norman, THE PSYCHOLOGY OF EVERYDAY
THINGS (1988) [re-published as THE DESIGN OF
EVERYDAY THINGS] -- I suggest reading THINGS THAT
MAKE US SMART before reading this one
James Gleick, CHAOS: MAKING A NEW SCIENCE (1987)
-- I found this a fast, informative, and involving
book, almost like a well-written detective novel.
I stayed up all night to read it. Gleick is a
former science reporter for The New York Times and
now runs The Pipeline, which, like Delphi and
America Online, offers Internet access to the
public.
M. Mitchell Waldrop, COMPLEXITY: THE EMERGING
SCIENCE AT THE EDGE OF CHAOS AND ORDER (1992) -- I
suggest reading Gleick's CHAOS before reading this
one
I also often suggest Thomas Kuhn's THE STRUCTURE OF SCIENTIFIC
REVOLUTIONS as a useful source for understanding the dynamics of
systemic change in any setting, not just scientific or
technological ones. Finally, I often recommend (just on general
principles) Edwin Abbott's short book, FLATLAND: A ROMANCE OF
MANY DIMENSIONS, published in 1884 and now available in a Harper
& Row paperback.
I apologize for the length of this response. I hope you have
found it useful in some way. If you have any questions or
comments, please don't hesitate to contact me.
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YOUR ORIGINAL MESSAGE
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