Tansel --

I think your prices are extremely reasonable, and I think you are 
doing both the Squeak world and the larger CS world a great service!

Cheers,

Alan

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At 1:35 PM -0500 11/2/01, Editor - Squeak News wrote:
>Hi Phil,
>
>With apologies to everybody in the list I will make an exception and 
>discuss a commercial matter here. I believe in the free spirit of 
>Squeak and respect it a lot but what we are attempting to do could 
>not have been done without a price structure behind it.
>
>We would love to offer Squeak News at $19.95 per year, in fact I 
>would love to offer them for free! Unfortunately just the cost of 
>making these CDs and sending them is about US$6 per month per CD and 
>that doesn't include the cost of collecting and editing the 
>contents, and I am so incredibly indebted to authors who contribute 
>for free without any expectation of any sort. If you think about it 
>for the price you receive 11 CDs including postage and that makes 
>each CD cost you about $9 per CD and it doesn't make a business 
>sense to offer them even at these prices.
>It is funny that producing 1000 CDs would cost only a little more 
>than twice of producing the current level of 100-150 CDs (which is 
>roughly our current subscriber base) but we do not have any 
>financial backing to be able to mass produce many CDs and attempt to 
>market them. The first reaction of any financier or VC person that 
>sees Squeak News is: "Wow! What a great thing! But why is all that 
>effort for this obscure language that no one knows about? Why don't 
>we do this for C# or Java?" and start explaining to me how many 
>thousands of them we could sell, even at these prices. I imagine you 
>can guess my answer, and for this reason we have to make it work, 
>and it seems so far that we have to make it work without
>any help from any deep pockets.
>
>Squeak News prices will stay reasonably high for the foreseeable 
>future. We have no choice. Either at these prices or there can be no 
>Squeak News.
>Meanwhile we are setting up our members only on-line site but since 
>the download amounts will be quite high even the on-line membership 
>at current bandwidth prices will be over $19.95 per year and will 
>only be feasible for broadband Internet users.
>
>One thing we will do though we will put more and more articles and 
>some past articles to our free site.
>
>I would like to take this opportunity to thank to everybody who 
>contributed, subscribed, supported and recommended us. I think with 
>Squeak News we are discovering the real power of Squeak more and 
>more with every issue and this will flow back to the community in 
>one way or another even if doesn't immediately.
>
>Best Regards
>Tansel Ersavas
>Editor, Squeak News
>http://www.squeaknews.com
>
>Phil Weichert wrote:
>
>>  Maarten,
>>     Yes, SquakNews appears to be great.  However, at $99 us a year 
>>the price is
>>  steep.  The email version is just a review.  Maybe if the price was $19.95 a
>>  year they would get more subscribers.
>>    Great review - sure makes one want to go get a copy.
>>  Phil


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