Distributing SW online without printed manuals etc...

[Cryten]

Making a living on developing SW for the Amiga must be more and more difficult, and I doubt things will change much once Amiga OS4 arrives. One of the few things that may raise the margins, and thus the need to sell a huge amount of copies, is to distribute the SW online without any printed manuals.

One really bad effect that spring to mind is that online distributed SW would reduce the retailers income, and thus making it difficult to sustain a reasonable amount of retailers. On the other hand, most of us might actually enjoy an easer access to SW if we could buy it online and at the same time is able to download it.

Would you/we be willing to make this tradeoff to support a bit wider range of SW?

Just asking out of curiosity (maybe a poll would have been more suitable?).

[Cryten]

that_punk_guy wrote:
Are you talking about the retailer's income or the developer's income? Because while online sales might harm sales through independant shops, they do benefit the developers by reducing the cost of distribution.

I thought I was quite obvious in pointing out that it would benefit developers, but might harm retailers   :-).  Anyway, I was mostly curious whether people would accept this way of distributing the SW if it would help boosting the range of SW available.

I guess we're all quite materialisticly oriented, even though most of our stuff just end up being stored and finally thrown away in a dumpster.

I think it would be a huge benefit for developers to distribute their products in this way, because it removes the risc of getting stuck with a storage filled with unsold SW that cost a fortune to manufacture (boxes, manuals etc). Then again, as been mentioned before, there's a huge problem involved for those that's stuck with a modem or similar DL-solutions. I guess they would have to provide a special solution for them (sending the SW on a CD?).