[10579] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Schools and the NII
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Barry Shein)
Sun Feb 27 07:43:59 1994
Date: Sun, 13 Feb 1994 15:54:29 -0500
From: bzs@world.std.com (Barry Shein)
To: stpeters@dawn.crd.ge.com
Cc: STAPLETON@bpa.arizona.edu, com-priv@psi.com
In-Reply-To: Dick St.Peters's message of Sun, 13 Feb 94 14:57:33 EST <9402131957.AA09502@spare-parts.crd.Ge.Com>
>From: stpeters@spare-parts.crd.ge.com (Dick St.Peters)
>They are mostly rewritten for each edition,
>mostly by new experts writing for a new context.
Yes, I am sure they are reworked, facts updated, style modernized etc.
But my point was they still have their original text and style and
tables etc to work from and which they own. That's a big headstart.
>If the encyclopaedia companies can produce what is effectively a new
>encyclopaedia for each edition, they could do the same in producing a
>government encyclopaedia under contract.
Yes, *THEY* could do the same. Sure. The original proposal seemed to
me to be that the govt just open a Dept of Encyclopaedia and dive in
and write one. That's a far different thing. Assumptions are changing
here as responses are being answered.
I tend to doubt any encyclopaedia company would do this for less than
a king's ransom or much less than their own expected revenues if they
hadn't done this. Imagine if you had written a book, "The Guide To
Com-Priv" and it sold well, you were personally taking in
$10K/quarter. Now I'm the govt and come to you and say could you re-do
basically the same book but refocus it a bit so we can put it online
and distribute it for free? How much would you want for that? Probably
around $10K/quarter or whatever you expected in the future (obviously
books decay in income while encyclopaedias that are kept updated must
not or else the companies would all be out of business.)
I suppose what I am saying is that either it's a pipe dream, or a
dangerous one (i.e. money pit.) Why is an encyclopaedia a first
target? Why not a dictionary (a free dictionary would also help
bootstrap a lot of other software, I often get requests for a freely
redistributable dictionary from software vendors, and they're hardly
the only ones interested, just thought I'd point that out.) Why not
the great works of dead white men? Why not all the K12 textbooks which
many school districts can't afford to buy? How about newspapers?
The list goes on and on, and therein lies the problem. Information is
big. Information is mind-bogglingly big.
>The issue isn't whether the governement could creat an encyclopaedia,
>the issue is whether it should.
Feasibility is part of that equation. No sense building nine lane
highways that end in cornfields. It would be nice to think that after
spending some tens of millions of dollars and ten or more years that
we'd get something out the other end.
If the issue is really K12 I could imagine accomplishing this and it
could be done by next September and for a rather bounded cost: Buy a
few copies of Grolier's online encyclopaedia, or Britannica or
whatever, for each K12 public school along with a few seats to use the
CD/ROMs. Total cost? One unit would be around $500 for the
encyclopaedia and, say, $1500 for a pretty good PC outfitted with a
CD/ROM, so $2,000/seat. So 10,000 such seats would cost around $20M.
And the great thing is that you could buy some other CD/ROMs over time
and not have replicate the seats themselves. What's your budget and
time-line?
There's nothing particularly magical about "the net" in this regard,
in fact it may be a fairly poor way to distribute this sort of thing
at this time and for the foreseeable future (think thru the technology
involved and compare that with just plugging those CD/ROMs into PC's
at the schools.)
That's part of the problem. You'd set out to distribute what appears
to be a fairly clear object, an encyclopaedia, and next thing ya know
you'd be in the software devpt business (both network server and
clients for PC's, Mac's, whatever is out there in K12), security,
probably accounting (gotta show it's being used!), network server
management, network management, etc etc. I mean, the K12's in general
aren't even on the net. Maybe that should be attacked first?
I dunno. Information is very big, it's also quite difficult.
-Barry Shein
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