[2529] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: Books and journals on-line from publishers and vendors
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Sean Donelan)
Fri Mar 13 17:24:06 1992
Date: Fri, 13 Mar 1992 16:20:47 -0600 (CST)
From: SEAN@SDG.DRA.COM (Sean Donelan)
To: com-priv@psi.com
X-Vmsmail-To: SMTP%"com-priv@psi.com"
>Be sure when you talk to publishers and vendors that you emphasize the
>importance to their business (as well as to our user communities) of making
>their catalogs and indices freely accessible - e.g., by WAIS.
Publishers, book jobbers, information vendors, etc all realize this. If
you have the money, they will be happy to flood you with information. For
their "best" customers, vendors already provide toll-free numbers, free
catalogs, even on-line access to their databases and ordering functions.
But if you don't buy anything from them now, I don't expect them to target
you for any of the "freebies."
I expect the network will make it cheaper and easier for those who get the
information now, to continue to get it. But I'm not sure that it will narrow
the gap between the have's, and have-nots. Especially if people can't
figure out if we're building a Gigabit network for the top 200 researchers,
or trying to get any bits to thousands of K-12 schools.
It would cost $6 million dollars per year to provide a Prodigy account to
every library (public, K-12, university, etc) in the U.S. For the amount
of money the government is planning to spend on the NREN, I hope they get
what they pay for.
--
Sean Donelan, Data Research Associates, Inc, St. Louis, MO
Domain: sean@sdg.dra.com, Voice: (Work) +1 314-432-1100
