William Dupont
> I have no idea how much profit Stata makes from their manuals, but I
> would assume that Stata is primarily a statistical software
> company and
> only secondarily a publishing company.
Who knows? Economics is full of surprises.
I have heard it said that restaurants are lucky to break even on main
courses, but make their profit on starters and desserts.
> Stata is of limited value without the
> documentation and the manuals are of no value whatsoever
> without Stata.
This is an exaggeration. The manuals carry a lot
of good explanation of various methods. It would be
surprising if anyone bought them for that reason alone,
but "no value whatsover" is too harsh. I certainly
buy books on software I never use if the ideas covered
are interesting or useful, although they're an order
of magnitude cheaper.
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