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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;krispy, post: 649377, member: 19065&quot;]Razor, I didn&#039;t speak in absolutes and I don&#039;t believe in them. I did not make reference to any specific field of endeavor but claiming something so ambiguously like &#039;most of the really useful information (<b>you</b>) find online completely free&#039; hasn&#039;t any more weight than my 2¢ (hint: cost) comment. This is hardly even worth (hint: cost) debating based on your generality you tried to overturn my statement with. I&#039;d also wager (hint: costs) that what <u>you</u> find is not completely free either, nothing is &quot;completely free&quot;. Used a computer to search that &quot;really useful info&quot; from home did you? You paid an ISP and bought hardware of some kind to get at it. Used a library machine/services? You paid though taxes, personal time and trips to the library which may not be in walking distance requiring the costs of a car, bus, bicycle or taxi to reach, whether it&#039;s at a local branch or at a school&#039;s computer lab. Using a college&#039;s computer lab? That convenience comes out of tuition costs. At work? Are you searching personal things online? &quot;Get back to work! You&#039;re not paid to use company tools for personal research!&quot; You get the drift..., there&#039;s an angle of cost involved no matter how you look at it. What you find &quot;completely free&quot; online may well be the most base form of cumulative superficial knowledge readily available and it may also be what gets you, personally, by in life, that&#039;s cool, but it&#039;s not how businesses and scholars work or use information and it is that which I was getting at about paying for information as a <u>product</u> such as CoinFacts or other numismatic databases provide.</p><p><br /></p><p>There ARE plenty of fields and institutions which only make privy &#039;good&#039;, accurate and useful data for their business partners or members for a fee. It is treated as a product and it must be free of flaws and it must be accurate and if one could easily find it elsewhere on their own, no one would pay for it. Certainly many people can afford to buy information if they cannot spend the time or effort doing it themselves, it makes doing business easier and more broadly applicable. It&#039;s not so simple to say people are lazy, unless of course they purchase and use flawed data/product carelessly and assumptively. Paying for information is the cost of having someone else assemble the data you need, to keep those records relevant and to maintain websites, monitor web traffic, overhead costs, etc. This is no economy to give away things for free especially when a competitive edge may help you stay afloat by protecting your information and/or not wasting costs maintaining that data.</p><p><br /></p><p>If the information is inaccurate as some suggest CoinFacts may be, then no one will buy it. CoinFacts or whomever is providing it must have researched the demand and/or the high traffic on their web site because enough people find their information useful. Offending the first few people that mooch off their site for free on a regular basis must be worth it for them to try this out as a pay site. Becoming a pay site might signal other changes to come or help them develop a better more accurate tool for subscribers. If it&#039;s got bad data now, it will not be able to continue with these inaccuracies if they intend to maintain subscription. </p><p><br /></p><p>So many people are so immediately reactionary about change and are far too cheap and not forward thinking enough to realise things of value before them let alone pay for it without complaining like it was some sort of born right. Yes it&#039;s initially disappointing but it&#039;s not free and it really never was free, because if it was full of mistakes when free, and it could have cost you when dealing, buying and selling your coins.</p><p><br /></p><p>Yes, there are a lot of promises out there, online especially, that paying for something gives you more but in fact only turns out to be something that a dedicated researcher could have found for themselves for &quot;free&quot;. Fools and their money remain easily parted. The answers are usually there for those who know where and how to look. Plenty of facts can be had for free online or with a bit of research in a library. The type of information in a paid subscription from protected reference databases as I was suggesting is not to be feared or ran away from, but understood to be less accessible to others thus helping a subscribers business, reassuring the facts are straight or in protecting the data providers&#039; business from those seeking to gain by accessing &quot;free&quot; information.</p><p><br /></p><p>You can read the Red Book or other numismatic reference guides / publications at a book store or in a library without paying for them. A lot of people around here don&#039;t run from the Red Book or other coin publications, they run <i>to them</i>,<u> buy</u> them, and quote information from them all the time, often without the slightest regard for copyright or citing sources. Paying for a subscription coin database is no different than buying a Red Book.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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