Re: the alternative?

> Liam Quin <lee@sq.com> wrote:
>> [...] If the price becomes 1/10th of today's
>> prices, but you sell 1,000 times more, you will be very happy.

Erik van Blokland <evb@knoware.nl> at Leterror wrote:
> Though typefaces share the same fileformat, they do not represent the 
> same value. Lowering prices will not make fonts containing symbols of an 
> long lost language sell more copies. It will just lower income.

Yes, it's clear that if there is a small, fixed-sized market, there is a
limit to the increase in sales you get for reducing the price.
But that is not true in all cases.

Fonts on the Web could lead to vastly greater exposure for small
font foundries, who may well experience significantly increased revenue.
It remains to be seen.

Consider the possibility of a `purchase this font' button in Netscape or
Microsoft Interenet Explorer -- it looks in the font for the URL of the
vendor & the foundry, and offers to connect you...  This is of course
technically possible, if OpenType includes the necessary information.

For that matter, when you save the document and open it in Page Mill or
HoTMetaL Pro, maybe you could get a similar `purchase opportunity' :-)

    This document used fonts that are not on your system.
    B&H Lucida Fax
    Tiro 1520 Garamond
    Berthold Bembo Italic OSF
    [1] substitute others...
    [2] purchase...
    [3] try to steal them

if you press [3], you get to
    Oops, an alarm went off and you were caught.
    Pay fine?
:-)

Lee

-- 
Liam Quin, SoftQuad Inc    | lq-text freely available Unix text retrieval
lee@sq.com +1 416 239 4801 | FAQs: Metafont fonts, OPEN LOOK UI, OpenWindows
SGML: http://www.sq.com/   |`Consider yourself... one of the family...
The barefoot programmer    | consider yourself... At Home!' [the Artful Dodger]

Received on Friday, 23 August 1996 13:10:57 UTC