Wow, very cool! (even though canon is continually misspelled in the article, pet peeve of mine). So, how could this have been test marketed and failed when tech fans are almost begging for something like this to exist. I don't get it.
This is, hands down, the most awe-inspiring, amazing, ambitious Trek-product I've ever seen, so tragic it will never be released
@Sparkytim - That's so sad that it didn't test well. But I think you answered why with the timing of the earthquake / tsunami in Japan. Was it only marketed to Japan or was there to be an English version available for US/West? It would've been awesome if brought to the states.
This product is like a dream come true for fans of the 1701-D, we need to petition the makers to get this product out, even if it had to be direct sales, I know I would pay a premium for this
It was developed primarily for the Japanese market, but I don't know whether an English language edition would necessarily have followed. As I said in the videos though, all the text for the magazine was prepared in english. You'll get no argument from me, though - if it had gone ahead, I would've tried my best to convince the powers that be to try and get it on-sale in the US. If nothing else, the positive reactions both here and elsewhere around the web show there's a definite hunger for these kinds of products!
It's actually happening, folks. Coming from a company called DeAgonstini: http://www.modelermagic.com/?p=31147
Afraid not - the project was cancelled a couple of weeks after the post you linked to went up. Sorry!
It sounds like the model was fully developed, and most of the materials were already created. Am I misunderstanding at all? Given that, it's just STUNNING that the publisher would scrap all that work. I can see "holding it" for a while, but scrapping it? That's just not sane. I think this is an amazing concept. Such a project would never even get a "green light" here in the states, I'm afraid, because the publishing folks are scared of doing ANYTHING "tech-ish." That they blame that on the "lack of a market for this sort of thing," rather than recognizing that the market is there for QUALITY WORK (like this clearly is!) just shows that making a big income and sitting in a corner office doesn't require any actual common sense. This was to be 100 issues... presumably weekly, correct? So, basically two years worth. I would strongly recommend trying this out in the States, but not selling it on a news stand. This should be sold through subscription... and the best place to do this would be through a site like Amazon. The thing would be sold as a subscription... each month, you'd be "auto-billed" 1/100 of the total price of the set, and you'd be auto-shipped that week's package. You'd need an initial run of the items, and would need to keep the ability to produce more as required, of course, but would not ever have to worry about "returns" (except for quality issues) like you'd have to worry about if it were sold on newsstands. Seriously... this is a fantastic idea. What was the total selling price for the set, and thus the "weekly selling price" of each issue? The periodical concept is great, since it's an 'installment plan" that the owner has a true incentive to keep up-to-date with! I WANT ONE. I mean, I want the whole freakin' set. Is it literally DEAD (ie, all materials now lost) or was it just shelved, due to the earthquake? I can't imagine how ANYONE would permanently kill this, or anything else, without taking into account the quake's impact. NOBODY can be that insular, can they?
holy schnikes. i can't remember the last ST thing as cool as this. i don't know which is better--the incredible model and the hundreds of pages of treknology--and this product offers both! oh i can see this being a big moneymaker, easily. and it'd be well worth it too, for the quality, for the unique features. no ripoffs here. and in my dreams, i see it continuing on... the same treatment given to the constitution-class enterprise. that would really be something.
@Cary L. Brown - The model was fully developed, but I guess only the relevant parts for the test had been mass produced. We'd only created up to around issue 12-13 of the magazine and blueprint sheets (although considerable planning had been done for both so for the most part we knew what contents were available for all 100 issues). You're right - this was a weekly product. The way partworks are sold in Europe and Japan is that the first six or so issues appear prominently in newsagents/supermarkets, etc, along with a major television advertising campaign, and thereafter it basically becomes a subscription only product. No partwork publisher has been able to sell these sorts of products in the US because the television market is so huge and fragmented making effective advertising impossible or just too expensive to justify. Over here in the UK, for example, you get an advert on during one of the big TV shows at primetime and the job's done. It's not so easy in the States, and publishers are, I think, wary about trying where others have failed. Excuse my ignorance, but I don't know what the per issue cost was off the top of my head - that was decided by the Japanese publisher, and I don't have a copy to hand to see the cover price! As for 'is it literally dead?' I honestly don't know. I very much doubt any of the model molds have been junked, so it's not inconceivable that it could be looked at again sometime in the future. Certainly everyone's positive reaction to it here can't do any harm.
I had a large number of the Fact Files (I'm in Australia... that kind of thing, serial magazines that grew into a set used to do pretty well here, though I haven't seen a similar one for some time). This just looks so awesome I'd definitely give it a go. And I think it might do well here as well, the only thing Australia has going against it is our relatively small population compared to Japan and the US. As I recall the Fact Files did pretty well here and I knew a few people who collected the entire set. I missed a few of them and eventually stopped buying them and always regret that I did. Some sort of subcription model would definitely work though.
Darn. I wasn't going to go for it myself, but I feel bad for everybody who was excited about getting it.
What an interesting project! I like the concept and never heard of something like that before. After watching the videos and hearing of some of the people involved, I'm disappointed that this never got produced. I think it would have been cool.