EBooks on CD-ROM
I was thinking about publishing e-books on CD-ROM. I think it made more sense back in 2000 when hard drives were much smaller, but it seems to me that trying to distribute a book on CD has a lot of the disadvantages of paper, plus a few extra that paper does not have: you still have to physically mail the disk with all the resulting time delay, international customs on mailed disks, material and time costs, money collection and order fullfillment. All those can be overcome, but I wonder if the demand is there to make it worthwhile?
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Lulu dropped the CD part on books. It seems it was very slow selling, and several people noted that, should you want a CD, you could download for a third of the cost and put it on CD yourself.
Thinking a little more on this. I guess if I was going to set up an ebook publishing business on my own and operate out of my home (especially outside the US) I would probably offer books on CD in addition to downloads if I could not make arrangents for POD books.
Selling downloads is certainly easier, faster, cheaper, and so forth.
But, aren't (the proverbial) we at a point where we expect everything accessible on the Internet to be free? And, analogously, isn't it true that people think in terms of tangible "products" when they buy something? These factors would seem to suggest that ePublished material would be more remuneratively marketable on CD-ROMs than on-line.
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