Well, I'm sure you have all heard the story about the chap who has a squeaky floor board. He tries everything to cure it, but fails. He calls in a number of experts who also fail. Finally, he calls in an old-timer. The old boy walks across the floor and takes out his hammer, and then hits one nail. The squeak is gone. He presents a bill for $200. The homeowner is aghast and remonstrates; it only took seconds, how can the bill be hundreds? The old boy replies you're not paying for the swinging of the hammer, but the knowing where to hit, which in turn came from years of experience.
So, is ÂŁ35 expensive for a paper back? It's certainly expensive for the paper, but then you're not buying paper, you are buying knowledge. If you wanted to get this knowledge yourself, what would it cost?
Some 7-8 years ago, someone got in touch with me about the pattern analysis software. He had a team of programmers working on a similar task but they could not get it to work. He had spent ~$100K on it to date. So, just for argument's sake, take the cost of the software as $100K if you paid someone to write it - that's 2004 figures, so call it $150K in today's money. On top of the scanning software, the book uses more code - about the same number of lines as the scanning software but more straightforward, so assume it would cost another $50K for a professional programmer. ($200K)
Next, there are the commercial software licences. The one for Matlab is ~$2500 - $10,000 per year. I don't know what CCM+ costs but I'd guess upwards of a few thousand dollars a year. Plus, you need to know how to use them or outsource the work. ($15,000)
It's one thing outsourcing programming, but you need to tell the programmer what to do. If you only have the idea you'll need a mathematician of some sort to explain to the programmer what is needed in terms they can implement. What would a consultant mathematician cost? If you could find one, probably a few tens of thousands, say $50K. ($50K)
So far, you are down about $300,000. Time to start some data gathering! If you can do 30 patterns a day, the 3000 odd patterns will take 100 days. Bill this at $10/hour, $80/day, or $8000 for the lot. If you don't value your sanity, you can scan about 30 patterns a day, so that's another $8000. ($16,000)
The cost of computers, cameras, paper, shells, gun trades, chokes, fuel, range hire came to about $20,000.
Now you are ready to sit down and start reducing the data to conclusions, writing it all up, making some kind of story out of it. Even if you average one page per day, that's ~300 days of labour. Since we are not talking kid's story book here, you have to bill at a professional rate, say $100K per year, or ~$125K for the 300 days. ($125K)
That's a grand total of ~$425,000. I know a lot of people will cry foul here and say you'd "do it yourself" and not pay going rates. But the thing is, unless you are a programmer, mathematician, engineer, and practical physicist, and have access to the tools, the task won't get done. $55 for access to $400,000 of unique effort that won't be repeated; it's a bargain really. Bear in mind also, that $425,000 does not include the value of having the ideas, which really are priceless.
Of course, you might be the person who looks at a fine gun and says, "It's a lot of money for some wood and metal".