>Maybe you don't know but AD&D has recently been published on CD-ROM.
>It has all the rules, character generation system, but I have yet to
>see it on my computer screen.
It was actually a few years ago. I know someone who works for a company that published a set of rules on a CD and found that it was much more expensive than you might expect. His estimate was that it cost about $50,000 to set up the master. Mostly this is because the search engines you need for the product to be useful are not free and the you need someone who has a very good idea what they are doing to run the project. You have to convert a lot of data that is in text to HTML and convert the graphics also. It takes time.
The cost per disk is much lower than it is with paper, but it is not a few cents. A gold blank is going to cost you a dollar, even in quantity. And a gold blank requires burning the image by hand. If you stamp them out they are cheaper per CD, but the setup cost is very steep. If you stamp 20,000 it gets fairly cheap, but not if you do 500.
I would be a really cool idea to build a CD that is a Gloranthan sourcebook, but I don't think it would be a comercially viable idea. But is someone gets enough info put into HTML you can burn a web site onto a CD. But you are never going to make any money doing it. But then again, not many people are Glorantha to make money.
Kevin
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