I never suggested that he not charge for the product, it just seems that in the modern connected age, faciliated by boards such as this, he should have shifted his view a bit and leverage the community to make his product that much better.
Now I'm not going to suggest that when he started he said "I'm going to ensure that mediocrity is the herald of the day for this product". But, from reports, that's what ended up as the end result.
And apparently the errors are fairly gross that any reasonable review of the finished material would have brought them to light.
If MM had made a plea for help to this board, or the TML, I assert he would have had more volunteers to offload all of the labor that goes in to producing this product than he would have known what to do with.
Many folks have scanners and software capable of the task of assembling the CD-ROM. His greatest expense would have been shipping the materials to folks to scan it in, as most folks would be hesitant to cut the bindings off of their own books.
He would have found folks who would have gladly taking the time to scan, proofread, and rescan to make sure that the book they scanned was good enough to suit them, the folks the product is targeted at, the long time fans of the system.
All of that labor would have been saved on his part, and he'd only have to focus on coordinating a final review, organizing the CD, and burning the master -- hardly the most critical part of the project. If folks were handed a directory named "MT" with a dozen PDF files, folks would have been happy enough.
All of that labor wouldn't have cost him a dime, would have saved time, would have resulted in a product of superior quality, and left him to work on his other projects.
Instead, we got a rush job that may have well been thrown together in a weekend -- and this thread is almost a year old.
It's just disappointing.
