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As some of you know, for years we have offered free CDs and DVDs of the content from our website for those who would like to access teaching when disconnected from the Internet.
We have mailed out over 1,700 CDs or DVDs to 70 different countries around the world.
However, for reasons described below, we are discontinuing our CD and DVD offerings in favor of providing off-line content via individual course downloads over the Internet.
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Our CD and DVD snapshots of course material from the website were woefully out of date (by 5 years or more).
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We now serve up over 350 videos constituting about 120GB of data.
This would require more than 25 DVD’s to capture and send out via postal mail—at prohibitive cost.
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Ignoring the video content, we have about 14GB of related course material (notes, slide presentations, and audio recordings).
Sending this material without the videos would still mean sending 3 DVDs to each request.
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CD and DVD format is on the way to becoming obsolete.
Many computers (especially laptops) and portable devices (phones, tablets) cannot play CDs or DVDs.
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Postal costs continue to escalate.
Rather than using postal mail, we've enhanced the website to make it easier to
download individual courses
in the form of ZIP files.
Although some of the ZIP files can still be fairly large, most are much smaller than the ISO images for the individual CDs and DVDs we previously offered.
Due to their inherently large size,
videos are not included within ZIP
files for individual courses.
A ZIP file for a course, once downloaded and unzipped
on your local device, will include everything except the videos: which will still require an Internet
connection to view. (For offline access of videos, you will need to download them separately—from the same
download page
.)
We appreciate your patience as we work through this transition. — Tony
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Tony Garland
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Newsletter - October 7, 2017
