List, I mailed the following letter today to Larry Ashley, and will let you know if anything comes of it. Perhaps if others mail him suggestions, it will come to pass. John Formsma Blue Mountain, MS mailto:jformsma@dixie-net.com ************** Dear Mr. Ashley: I hope this letter finds you well. I am writing you today because I have an idea for the future of the Pierce Piano Atlas. This good resource would be very useful in today's computer age by having electronic access to the data you provide. Not only would it be a good service to piano technicians and others in the piano business, it would also provide another way for you to make money for the resource you provide. Many of us in the piano service community use computers exclusively to manage our customer data, so it would be easy to market this concept to us. Having this data on the computer would be ideal for us technicians who enter information about the pianos we service. For example, while entering customer data, rather than having to flip through the pages of the Atlas to find a piano's age, electronic access would be quicker, and we could leave our printed Atlas in our service vehicles for any reference needed in the field. There are two ideas that come to mind. First and easier, you could publish the book in electronic format. The format would be essentially the same as the book is now-a list of manufacturers and serial numbers. There are computer programs called "readers" (such as Acrobat Reader) which would be good for this kind of data. Acrobat has a search feature, for example, which would allow a serial number lookup for a particular brand. A second way is to have a computer program access a database with serial number data. The user interface could be quite simple: type in the manufacturer's name and the serial number, and the computer could display the date of manufacture. Oddities, such as Wurlitzer's irregular serial numbers, could be displayed in a third window that would appear after the search was completed in order to let the user know that the piano has another possible date of manufacture. I am not a computer programmer, so I do not know how difficult writing the program would be. However, Steinway and Yamaha have pages on their web sites allowing the public to enter the serial number and find the age of a particular piano. Therefore, the technology exists, and could theoretically be done for all the pianos in the Atlas. Such a program could be distributed on a CDROM, and yearly updates to the data could be done either by World Wide Web download (for a small fee) or distribution of a new CD (also for a fee). Perhaps the program itself could be available for download from the web, making a CDROM unnecessary except for those who do not have web access. One potential benefit that may be attractive to you is reducing or eliminating printing costs by publishing your resource in electronic media only. As a marketing idea, you could charge the same (very likely less, though) for the information, but publish electronically. Not only would you save money by eliminating the printing costs, you could produce CDROMs only as needed-i.e., when orders are filled-and not have stock lying around waiting for a purchaser. Maybe these are things that you have already thought of doing, but I wanted to write to let you know of some possibilities as we move steadily into the "paperless" age. Sincerely, John M. Formsma Piano Tuner-Technician
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