Versioning: The Smart Way to Sell Information Versioning: The Smart Way to Sell Information by Carl Shapiro and Hal R. Varian From the Magazine (November-December 1998) Post Post Share Save Buy Copies Print In 1986, Nynex issued the first electronic phone book, a compact disc containing all the telephone listings for the New York area. Charging $10,000 a copy, the company sold the CDs to the FBI, the IRS, and other large commercial and governmental organizations. Sensing a great business opportunity, the Nynex executive in charge of the project, James Bryant, left to set up his own company, Pro CD. His goal was to produce an electronic directory covering the entire United States. The phone companies, fearing an attack on their lucrative yellow pages businesses, refused to license digital copies of their listings to Pro CD. But that didn’t stop Bryant. He went to Beijing and hired Chinese workers—at $3.50 a day—to type into computers every listing from every U.S. telephone book. The...