All The Wisdom in the World, ...or at least, Our World.

[Steve]

I was searching through the Archieves for something and discovered
that /text searching/ the archive was a 100 times easier than using
the worthless Yahoo Group Search tool.

Then I thought about downloading the entire contents of the archives.

Then I wonder if anyone else would be inclined to do the same.

Then I wonder if anyone would like the entire 'Harry Potter for
Grownups Archive' on CD-ROM.

You REALLY can search for terms and phrase much much faster than using
the Yahoo groups search.

I haven't downloaded everything, but I have 30,000 posts and they take
up 25Mb of space on my hard drive. That means the entire archive would
fit on a single CD with room left over for some freeware tools for
extracting and searching the data.

SO...

This is a preliminary inquiry, if I put the archive on CD-ROM with
tools to extact, view, and search, would anyone be willing to pay me
$2 or maybe $3 for my time plus postage? 

Remember, this isn't free for me, I have to buy the CD's, burn them,
buy a CD storage envelope, buy a CD shipping enevelope then haul it
all down to the post office and put postage on it. I don't have to
make money, but I absolutely can NOT afford to lose money on the deal.

It should be noted that the current archives extend from the EGroups
version of HP4GU to 68,000 posts in the current group. The most recent
post is 113,681. If the demand is strong enough, maybe we can
encourage them to update the archives. 

Since I burn my CD/R-ROMs as 'multi-session' you could add to the disk
as the archives are updated. Or, I would be willing to sell new full
CD's or just the update CD too.

At this time, this is just a thought; ...so, anyone interested?

Steve/bboyminn