Like Mark Twain, reports of the death of compact discs are greatly exaggerated. Nevertheless, it is getting too expensive, difficult and impractical to keep producing CDs, especially in the wake of more popular formats, like streaming audio and ebooks.
So we’re going to slowly ramp down production and sales of our CD products. In the short term, this includes our individual dialect manuals with accompanying single CD. In the longer term, this includes our two dialect books: the original Accents & Dialects for Stage and Screen (with 12 CDs) and Dialects of the British Isles (with 5 CDs).
If you wish to purchase these individual-dialect manuals (with a single CD), we suggest you do so this year, as we cannot guarantee that we will be selling them after 2026. But we have enough CDs in stock to keep selling the CD versions of Accents & Dialects for Stage and Screen and Dialects of the British Isles into 2027 and perhaps beyond, depending on demand.
The good news is that all this material is already available in better and more affordable formats! The individual-dialect manuals are available as ebooks. And Accents & Dialects for Stage and Screen Deluxe Streaming Edition (a print product with streaming audio) has been the preferred format for several years, accounting for about 90 percent of our sales. This is because it is less expensive than its CD counterpart and offers three more dialects. And its $79.95 price means that it’s only slightly more than twice the cost of a single-dialect manual – though it contains 27 dialects and accents! It is the superior product.
And to make it even better, we are offering a spring sale on Accents & Dialects for Stage and Screen Deluxe Streaming Edition. From now until June 21, it will sell for $74.95 on PaulMeier.com instead of its usual $79.95. (The sale is only here, not on Amazon, though Amazon Prime members might still find it cheaper on Amazon. And if you are outside the United States, please check your own nation’s Amazon.)
We wish we didn’t have to make this change, but as a small business – and with changing technology – we must adapt. However, because of the success of ADSS Deluxe Streaming, we are confident about the future and proud to offer this great product, in addition to our ebooks.
