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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;rasiel, post: 997490, member: 15452&quot;]hey guys, this is ras... the guy who works on the eric books. sorry i&#039;m so late to the thread but it just came to my attention.</p><p><br /></p><p>chris your points are really interesting and made me think for a good while before starting a reply. i can&#039;t say i agree or disagree... i&#039;m still a bit at a loss. i can see the dilemma and it had never occurred to me that you - and i suspect others - share the same concern.</p><p><br /></p><p>to me this project is analogous to an operating system. call it an OS for roman coins. all reference books, from numismatics to dictionaries to even online projects like wikipedia are by nature snapshots in time. without being continually refreshed each passing day they become more obsolete. for me to have rested on my laurels with 2005&#039;s eric would have been a mistake. i would have been stuck at windows 1.0 as it were and had i continued this career that could have been understood to mean that my level of expertise remained stuck at the entry level. when you buy an OS for your computer i would guess that you&#039;re investing in technology to stay relevant to today&#039;s needs. you also probably suspect that in a couple of years a new version will come out and your old software becomes worthless.</p><p><br /></p><p>books, however, do not necessarily depreciate. while i really, really doubt that that first eric will some day be actively sought out as a collector item in its own right the extant copies shouldn&#039;t become worthless overnight either. the last ebay sale i remember seeing (post-pdf release) didn&#039;t go for much less than when first released and a copy on there now has 9 bids. amazon copies go for ridiculous asking prices. why? i&#039;d say it&#039;s because the book, while ever more outdated, still is useful for its niche. picking up a hardcopy book is an entirely different experience than looking up something online or reading an ebook.</p><p><br /></p><p>looking forward this puts me in a quandary. i hope you and others can give me your thoughts and advice. is it better to freeze progress in the hopes of locking in commercial gain? who&#039;s to say someone else won&#039;t come along and come up with a better, more up-to-date product anyway? i would love to make an ERIC III some day. it would be more complete, more accurate and more of whatever you as collectors think needs revising or expanding on. if i gave byzantine anonymous issues short shrift then i can roll up my sleeves and see to it that the next edition has an outstanding chapter on these. but i can&#039;t do any of that if i&#039;m paralyzed with fear that i&#039;ll be stuck with pallets of unsaleable books.</p><p><br /></p><p>print media as a whole is on the cusp of a new era. doug summarized in an email that, when it came down to it, the worst thing about this new book is that it&#039;s a book. it left me wondering the rest of the day whether i&#039;d just put years of effort and oodles of money into making the equivalent of a state of the art typewriter. the new york times, i just read the other day, will someday fold because the news it carries is available for free (through no less than its own site!). cars killed the buggy. but tv didn&#039;t kill the radio. i just don&#039;t know where we&#039;re headed with coin books.</p><p><br /></p><p>for now, people still buy new dictionaries despite the fact that old ones from grandma&#039;s attic are still essentially just as useful. that&#039;s my sliver of hope right there.</p><p><br /></p><p>ras[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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