Guest guest Posted October 28, 2003 Report Share Posted October 28, 2003 All, > Bob, Ken, Z'ev, Emmanuel, Jason, et al, how long must we > wait for top class digitised material? If you mean ebook-type materials, there's not much in the way except that people don't buy them. There is the occasional demand for the PD on a PDA, but nothing that amounts to a market. Consider for example that many of the Wenlin's it took to get any attention to that product had to be sold at cost. If you mean systems, it depends on how much money you have. I have written and tested the functional code as a " hobby " over the last four years. To get it to a release point more quickly than my hobby time permits would mean hiring people to do the work. If you have (conservatively) $25,000 to $50,000, in a year you could probably have a data set that would be limited in the number of users and in the size of the data set only by the size and power of your hardware. It would be able to transfer characters seamlessly between Wenlin and any of the M$ Office programs, storing and displaying both traditional and simplified characters. There would be book-sized text fields in which mixed Chinese-English text could appear, variable notes, etc. Everything would be text searchable in both Chinese and English. Given a modern laser-type or ink-jet printer, you would be able to print mixed Chinese-English text. Most of the major technical issues have been resolved by technical advancements in the last couple of years. It would at this point, however, have only a basic set of terms, 5 or 6 thousand. The data engine alone would license for $500 on a single PC and would top- out somewhere around $20,000 for a school-sized system on a Linux or Unix server. Single user systems with similar development costs usually license for around $5,000 to $7,500 with $500 to $1000 annual maintenance subscriptions. In two years, with another $25,000 to $50,000 , it could have the entire PRC formulary (3,500) and materia medica (7.500) and the content of the major monolingual Chinese dictionaries (35,000), probably a reasonable selection of Chinese texts as well. Most of this would be the cost of data entry and proofing. Once the engine works, it works for as much as the hardware can hold. During the last decade I've seen three attempts to market database systems - - mostly for herbs -- that probably represent more than a million dollars in capital investment. One never made it to market, two just vanished. We never saw saleable product for the upfront money we anted-up for the last attempt. So, I don't think anyone is in a big hurry to throw a lot of money behind the idea. Practically, I think you can expect the clinically oriented database systems to expend their databases, and that you can expect more limited products that can sell in the $200-and-under range. But, a major digital resource that does justice to the scope of CM is not something I see coming into the commercial market very soon. Hopefully, some very bright folk are out there quietly solving all the problems and I will be proven wrong in that estimation. Bob bob Paradigm Publications www.paradigm-pubs.com P.O. Box 1037 Robert L. Felt 202 Bendix Drive 505 758 7758 Taos, New Mexico 87571 --- [This E-mail scanned for viruses by Declude Virus] Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You are posting as a guest. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.