Indeed, the overall economic impact of digital mapping products remain so small that an industry group, the International Map Trade Association, doesn't even list it as a category in its annual market-research study. Dinosars and beer For Cooperrider, who move from Menlo Park to Flagstaff, Ariz., late last year, making maps is a labor of love. He also sells maps to railroad museums and to mission churches. They can be used as a road map, he said, but they have enough historical and education information to qualify as bed-side reading. And they're pretty, too.
Maps are mix of cartography and art.
His inspiration came during a vacation to the Pacific Northwest where he found himself thumbing through a phone book hoping to find a brewpub in the next town down the road. Now, he said, he sells 10,000 to 15,000 maps a year. Surprisingly seasonal, with a long summer and the holiday as a sales peak, the map business isn't making him rich. That's one of the reason he left the Silicon Valley in late 2000. But he is having fun doing what he likes.