Buy or bind

In discussion at AIC, Jan Paris suggested that the cost of Rebinding
Later is often higher than the cost of Rebinding Immediately, because of
the added steps involved in re-identifying the book and transferring it
to the bindery prep people.  Let's call this the Additional Premium.
Though I'm rather skeptical about this being a significant factor, it is
nevertheless easily dealt with.  The simplest way is to add the
Additional Premium to the Premium in the above calculation.  This will
be slightly off, because it ignores the investment value of the
Additional Premium over the life of the book but is a simple
calculation which yields adequate results.  A slightly more precise
result would be produced by adding to the Premium the amount of money
that would have to be invested in order to yield the Additional Premium
over the life of the book.  Clearly, this is a recursive problem and the
calculations involved are non-trivial.  Unless the Additional Premium is
very large it can, I believe, be safely ignored.

If anyone is interested in having his/her very own copy of the Lotus
spreadsheet that implements the model, send me a message and I'll post
you a copy.

w

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                   Conservation DistList Instance 4:1
                   Distributed: Tuesday, May 12, 1990
                        Message Id: cdl-4-1-006
                                  ***