Market is slowly maturing and splitting into several species of product each taking advantage of different elements of the technology.One species is the new multi-media package especially created for the CD-ROM. The recently released Ancient Lands from Microsoft is in the class. More of that anon.
Another species is the existing reference book or set of books put on CD-ROM.
And another is the huge directory.
The last two have two advantages over the book form: they save an enormous amount of bookshelf space and it is far easier to search on a CD than through a book.
Also buyers have a very good idea what they are getting because they are usually familiar with the books.
For example, you know that a complete set of Commonwealth Law Reports and the Statutes and Regulations of the Commonwealth would cost, say, $10,000, so the CD version is a raving bargain from Disk-Rom.
You know that Roget’s Thesaurus, the World Almanac, the Heritage Dictionary, the Columbia Quotations and Concise Encyclopedia, the People’s Chronology and the Hammond Atlas would cost, say, $400, so packaged as Microsoft’s Bookshelf on CD at $159 they are a bargain. These value of these sort of products are in the text.
What then of the specially created CD, for which there is no book version.
I have been looking at a couple of these in the past week: Microsoft’s Encarta 94 (a general encyclopedia) and the previously mentioned Ancient Lands.
Ancient Lands ($115) is part of the exploration series and covers Ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome.
As a source of detailed knowledge of the ancient world, it is a dead loss. For example, the text on Julius Caesar is about a quarter of the entry in the general encyclopedia Encarta and about a third of the length of the entry in the Chambers concise. Apparently the conquest of Gaul was not worth a mention.
Technology has taken over. Most of the space on the CD has been surrendered to video and graphics. You can watch gladiators fight, for example. It is tabloid newspaper of the ancient world that happens to move if you click the right button. The label on the front should say: “”For children under 13”. A redeeming feature is the appeal to the under-13s. This is because the user drives it making choices about which cross-references to make.
Encarta, on the other hand, is a solid mid- to high-range encyclopedia with 9 million words (about 35 volumes). It takes excellent advantage of CD’s cross-referencing ability. Instead of the inconvenient qv in brackets (meaning look it up elsewhere in this book or series), the word appears in a different colour. When you click it a window opens with details.
For example, you might be reading about Henry VIII and mention is made of Anne Boleyn. If you are in to beheadings, you can click across to her and back. You can also cut and paste to a word-processor or other program.
It also has the other advantages of multi-media _ video and sound clips _ without overdoing them or making them the centre piece of the product. $199 it is far better value than Ancient Lands. From the sampling I took, it probably includes all the information of Ancient Lands.
Ancient Lands shows there is a danger with CDs: that is the seduction by the medium rather than the message. There are some great education opportunities with CD s, but unless the content is solid and the target age group stated, there are going to be some disappointed customers. I could not recommend Ancient Lands as anything more than as an expensive children’s colour-book on ancient history.
When you put it against Encarta and Bookshelf and you can see what can be achieved educationally on CD, it seems an enormous waste of effort.