We were discussing this in a meeting with the C-level execs and other top employees, and they were working out a plan for bulk manufacture of CDs containing the textbook content. Many of the textbooks already had CDs that came with them when you bought the physical book, but most of them did not, and we'd need to manufacture copies in either case. There was liner material to produce, CDs and cases to buy, global distribution to manage, and a new department and headcount needed to manage all of this.
I interjected with an idea. I was building the online display of this content, and had already built everything needed for converting the xml into a table of contents display and per-chapter displays, all in html with the styling that we wanted, including features like the substantial amount of cross-linking between sections, chapters, figures, indexes, appendices, etc. So I told them "You know, as part of the production process where I'm converting all of this xml for online display, I can also produce a set of static files that would work well for an offline display, either sitting in a folder or on a CD. We can do that, create an iso image from it, and let the customers download the iso and burn their own CD if they want physical possession. It'd be exactly the same content, and would only lack the online searching and dynamic excerpting features that the website has which depend on our search engine."
They were stunned. They discussed, and decided that for most of the customers this would be just fine, and for the handful of exceptions we could burn the CD for them and mail it. We included a cover-art image from the book on the CD if they wanted a liner, and our download links had a little help icon that pointed to documentation we wrote for a few free CD burning utilities. Overall cost was a few extra days of development time.
