> On Wed, 19 Mar 1997, Marie-Laure Bouchet wrote:
> > At a U.K. Serials Group Meeting, I asked a couple of representatives of
> > a publishers what they would do if Adobe were to start charging for
> > Acrobat Viewers. They replied that Adobe wouldn't do it as it would get
> > everyone's backs up.
> > It seems a rather precarious situation to be in, so I presume they are
> > working on something for the long run?
>
> I would be a bit tricky to charge for the PDF viewers that are already in
> use. So Adobe could only charge for new versions of the viewers and these
> would need to have significant functionality enhancement for people to
> want to ditch their existing free browsers. Plus there's the growing
> number of free browsers (xpdf for example).
Adobe started by charging for their viewers (I think), and soon realised
they needed to give them away to promote PDF. This has been a very
successful strategy, parallelling the strange development of giving away
expensive commercial software in the browser world. Personally, I don't
think they will change back to charging for PDF viewers, and indeed the
prices of other PDF-related products seem to be coming down as usage
increases.
--
Chris Rusbridge
Programme Director, Electronic Libraries Programme
The Library, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, UK
Phone 01203 524979 Fax 01203 524981
Email [log in to unmask]
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