Re: ebay dilemma / cdr seller

[PZ <skierpaul@yahoo.com>]

On May 26, 8:53 pm, ramito <ram...@san.rr.com> wrote:

> no point in selling old disks you actually bought
> when somebody can burn images & sell em cheaper.
>  Oh, wait, hey, maybe someone should burn asimov archives etc
>  & sell those as well to folks on ebay?
> OK buys beer for a few weeks I guess ;-)

and

>It was just an odd thought that came up - hey will I be the last person
>to sell a particular program on floppy before it then shows up on cd-r
>on ebay? Hence my question.

It does look like this guy did take some effort to make PDF scans of
manuals for a lot of this software.  It looks more like an enthusiast
providing a service to me with the fee being very minor on top of
media and labor and handling costs to produce the CD.  In comparison
Syndicomm charges $12 for System 6.01 which was was and is freely
distributable by Apple Usergroups. Its a service to just make the
software available in my eyes. I think creating a CD compilation with
document scans takes a lot more time and effort than just copying and
labeling 6 floppies and thus the $24 price is justified.

Secondly, I don't believe your originals are devalued in any way. Its
much nicer to handle an original manual than have to view a black and
white pdf.  Genuine Apple II users will buy your classic software for
this reason, and emulator users, who wouldn't buy your software anyhow
because they lack Disk II floppy drives or 800k 3.5's will buy the
CD's.  I don't see any conflict of interest here.

As far as burning Asimov archives and selling them on ebay, go ahead,
but I'm sure by the time you build the image, buy the cd's, make the
labels, scan the manuals, and test the software (many asimov images
are broken), you'll probably want to charge much more than this ebay
seller is.

- Paul