Quoting Nadav Har'El <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > The strange thing is that the online site should be cheaper for them to > operate. Selling physical books has huge overheads - the raw materials, > the printing presses, the commisions the stores stake (probably as much > as 50% of the price of the book); All these are saved in an online version, > and all they have to pay is for the internet access (this costs peanuts) > and for the coding, which ideally should be amortized over several years > of operations (unless you write crappy, non-standard code which becomes > worthless after a year!).
You're not in the GIS business, are you? First of all, the basic GIS system that allows them to do all this stuff probably cost them a hefty bundle which also needs to be amortized over the years. Second is the cost of the updated material. All those maps need to be digitized (it's not just scanning, you have to vectorize data and attach street addresses to it. It's a real drag). That digitization is either done internally (which means they have to pay salaries to the workforce that does the digitizing and to the workforce that QAs the data. QAing geographic data is not easy.), or they have to pay an outsourcing company that does that for them. In either case, it's way beyond the cost of just "hosting and basic programming". Herouth ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
