The Funk & Wagnalls DVD-ROM/Web encyclopedia: a publishing revolution's first reference point?

Emedia Professional, Sept, 1998 by Mark Fritz

Imagine the following scenario. You need information on a topic. You look it up in your encyclopedia and find no entry for it. Now, what do you do? If you don't have a Versabook library, you have to insert reference CD-ROMs into your drive and search through them one at a time. With a Versabook library, however, you could search across your entire library all at once. Funk & Wagnalls is the exclusive encyclopedia of the Versabook service, and the Library Builder utility is built into the DVD disc. Versabook search technology enables Boolean, full-text, titles, natural language, topics, proximity, and keyword searching.

FUNK & WAGNALLS AND DVD'S NEW DEAL

A title with broad consumer appeal like The Funk & Wagnalls Unabridged Encyclopedia will surely help jump-start the nascent DVD-ROM publishing market the way Compton's and Encarta did for CD-ROM. DVD-ROM drive bundling deals like the one CNS has struck with Sony for its new 5X DVDROM drive will help seed the market.

But parallels will probably end there. DVD is a whole new ball game. The optical disc no longer exists in a vacuum. The Funk & Wagnalls DVD disc may indeed start a revolution in the publishing of reference works. But the next big publishing revolution won't be a disc revolution; it will more likely be a disc/Web revolution.

RELATED ARTICLE: DVD the Hard Way: The Making of...

Developing the Funk & Wagnalls Unabridged Encyclopedia DVD title wasn't exactly a cakewalk, according to Community Network Systems CEO Harry Fox. Today, he says, developing "DVD is unnecessarily cumbersome and difficult," he says. "We went through a virtual minefield to get this out and have it work."

Fox says he's amazed and dismayed by the industry's "lack of coordination, consensus, and working standards." He says that he first got a taste of how the DVD industry was going to evolve when he attended a Toshiba meeting at Warner studios in June 1996. "When spec 0.9 was released, I knew then we were in for a roller coaster ride. This thing is not going to be stable." And his prediction was right. "We've had to make adjustments in our code for almost every board that came on the market," he says.

And Fox warns: "Unless things change quickly, DVD may end up in the same sort of scrap heap as MPEG-1." He says incompatibilities between Sigma Designs MPEG boards and every other type of MPEG board prevented MPEG-1 from realizing its full potential and greatly hamstrung the CD-ROM publishing business.

DVD also continues to have image and marketing problems. "DVD is having an identity crisis," Fox says. "The DVD player world has to prove itself as an alternative to laserdisc. A few people are buying DVD players, but for nothing more that video quality," he says, "and that's not enough to sustain a healthy market." Nevertheless, Fox concedes, "The product is penetrating in spite of itself."

Although the electronics manufacturers "don't have a clue," according to Fox, they've pressed on with DVD. They are desperate for new features to lure buyers to higher-end products, and they fear missing out on the next big thing. "People are banking on DVD and AC-3," says Fox. He includes himself in that group. "The storage benefits of DVD are just too enticing," he says.