Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="D_Sinclair" data-source="post: 1952769" data-attributes="member: 21823">Well, RPGMall was a half-hearted attempt. In this thread on rpgnow's message boards (<a href="http://forums.rpghost.com/showthread.php?t=21719" target="_blank">http://forums.rpghost.com/showthread.php?t=21719</a>), James admits he has done convention advertising twice. That thread is from last August and nothing has changed. Simply put, Minion Development Corp. made an attempt that wasn't worth the effort to begin with. Developing a new distributorship is a very lossy process that easily takes years to build up a client base to make the efforts profitable. Unfortunately, as with much of the past advertising done for the various bits and pieces of MDC, advertising seems to be done with an expectation of immediate fiscal gain, rather than with the expectation of cultivating nothing more than name recognition.As for on-demand kiosks in the stores, that isn't likely any time in the next 10 years. I've seen kiosk POD systems. $40K gets you a unit that's consume about 15 feet of one side of an aisle, not including the consumer interface, and the output is garbage. $20 will get you a unit the size of an endcap, but it can't do color and doesn't held enough paper to do more than two books at a time. POD only works when you get quality products, and for that, you need to spends between $150K and $250K on a high end system that can provide full color glossy covers. Then there's the additional overhead of not only paper storage, but also paper recycling. POD systems are sheet fed on paper 8.5x11 or larger. That means all those smaller books they sell will be generating a huge amount of waste paper. The vacuum, shredder, dumpster, and air filtration systems necessary for that will add at least $100K to a store. That doesn't even touch upon other issues, like taxes. Many states impose tax penalties for producing "disposable" products like newspapers, magazines, and serial books. So it will be quite some time before we see the big chain stores remodelling themselves to incorporate POD. Even then, it will be on a "superstore" basis, much like the concept used by crocery and department store chains.</blockquote>

Verification