Andrew Gray wrote:
2008/4/23 David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com:
On 23/04/2008, Mary Murrell wrote:
- Free as in $19.95-a-pop beer, yeah.
Not bad for a 1000-page lump of dead tree, I'd say.
Yeah. 20 EUR is, what, fifteen quid? That's pretty cheap for a hardbound general reference work, especially one run off with decent print standards (ie, colour throughout)
Britannica Concise is £50 for 2k pp.; DK's illustrated childrens' encyclopedia is £30 for 800pp; some random A-Z Reference Book is £25 for 1400pp; Hutchinson Encyclopedia is £40 for 1000pp.; Penguin Concise Encyclopedia is £19 for 1000pp (but is a rather cheap-looking paperback, probably not much in the way of colour)
Assuming the German one-volume quick-reference market is about the same as ours, it's priced well.
Indeed, anyone who would put an excessive price on an open source work runs the risk that anyone could legally reprint the same work, and undercut the overpriced edition.
Ec .