THE CAREER NOVELIST
What are CD-ROM products like? If you have not tried one, pre-
pare yourself: CD-ROMs combine text, pictures, sound, and moving
images in really cool ways. You can tour London's National Gallery,
play exotic musical instruments, study Beethoven's Ninth, look up
any phone number in any phone book, call up the street atlas for
any city or town, comb baseball stats and highlights, play Myst or
Doom or Iron Helix, fight the Battle of Gettysburg, visit the rainfor-
est, tour outer space, go to the San Diego Zoo, check into the Mayo
Clinic, interact with the Grolier Encyclopedia, and a whole lot more.
No one really knows exactly how many CD-ROM titles are avail-
able. U.S. estimates range from 3,500 to 10,000. InfoTech says that
by the end of 1994 there were 11,837 worldwide, and that world unit
sales for 1994 were 91.8 million. Ingram, the U.S. book wholesaler,
stocks about 1,500 titles and ships to 1,200 stores.
Sad to say, though, the development costs of these products are
high, and experts pretty much agree that fewer than two hundred
CD-ROMs have been profitable. On top of that, the best-selling CD-
ROM titles have mostly been games like Doom II, Myst, Sim City
2000, Seventh Guest, Nascar Racing, and Wing Commander IV.
Depressing, huh? It gets worse, because there is another catego-
ry of platform: electronic devices linked to television sets.
CD-I. This device works much like CD-ROM devices; it just isn't
hooked up to a computer. Phillip's CD-I machine plugs into any TV
set in the world and looks somewhat like a VCR. In addition to CD-
ROMs it plays audio CDs and Kodak PhotoCD disks. It can show real
moving images instead of the herky-jerky QuickTime found on other
players. It costs less than a PC, too, around six hundred dollars.
The "I" in CD-I stands for interactive. Games and golf (the sixteen
most challenging courses in the world!) are some of CD-I's better
available disks. There's also a photography course that lets you
snap pictures, choosing your F-stop, exposure, and other settings; it
then develops your "film" on screen. Like CD-ROMs, CD-I disks also
offer a museum tour, in this case the Smithsonian, complete with
moving images and the ability to rotate objects—even to turn them
upside down to see what their bottoms look like. There's also a tour
of the sunken Titanic, including the dance music that played while
the liner sank.