Our main goal with BeakerWare is to help biologists easily learn about software they might find useful, especially educational software that has an experimental focus or in some way goes beyond what could be put into a paper textbook. Now that we have set up this whole organization for advertising and distributing software, we are happy to take on more software and help the authors through whatever parts of the publishing process they don't want to figure out for themselves. This offer is both out of commercial and academic self-interest. From the academic perspective, the principle person behind this company is both a biologist and an educator and wants to promote the effective use of computers in these fields. From the commercial perspective, the more software we distribute (even for free), the more people we will reach, and some of them may decide to buy our other products as well.
So if you want someone else to deal with distribution, advertising, printing, sales, or any other aspect of the publishing process for your biology software (short of writing it), please get in touch. At the very least, we can offer advice, and if you want, we can work out a deal to do more (a free deal if you are giving your software away). For commercial software, BeakerWare will give you a much better, more flexible deal than any publisher (and also a larger percentage of the profits), and you'll retain as much control over the process as you want. BeakerWare currently distributes some of the world's top software for teaching ecology and conservation biology, gets over 3000 people visiting its web sites every month, advertises in several specialty journals, has booths at meetings, and the principal author has over 10 years of experience writing and marketing various biology software packages, so we more or less know what we're doing. If you want to talk, or just want some advice, email Eli Meir (who is happy to talk even if we don't end up making a connection).
As truth in advertising, BeakerWare is principally one person, Eli Meir. There is also a sales manager, a company that does much of the programming, and we have deals with several other consultants and companies to do artwork, editing, printing, and all the other little things to produce a nice product. We hope to hear from you, and we hope you find the stuff on this web site useful and interesting.
Eli Meir
University of Washington
meir@beakerware.org
Last updated 7 May, 2000