DVD-ROM: Who Needs It, Who Will Use It, and How?

In all the furor over bit budgets, bandwidths, video/ audio multiplexing, and aspect ratios, there is something being overlooked, whose presence in the daily lives of those affected by it is taken for granted, and increasingly so for most of the past ten years. This is a market that is traditionally ignored and underappreciated, but whose absence would make itself felt in myriad ways. It is the backbone of the CD-ROM industry, the "hidden" market that keeps plugging along, doing business, serving businesses, pressing discs, publishing information, and making profits, while the rest of the industry and the news media avidly follow the developments of each new rising technology star on the horizon.

It is the publishers of databases and other business titles on CD-ROM who are the real CD-ROM industry. For the most part, even today, it is the professional who relies on CD-ROM technology to do what it does best: deliver large amounts of computer data to many users on an inexpensive, compact, durable, high-capacity medium. The content may not be as glamorous as feature films, as fascinating as multimedia, or as game for its creators as the latest version of Arcturian Anarchist Attack, but the developers of multivolume computer databases now on CD-ROM, some of whom were once pioneers in CD-ROM publishing, are about to become pioneers in DVD-ROM publishing. More significantly, they are likely to be among the first to realize the benefits of DVD-ROM, and the first to capitalize on those benefits successfully.

DISC'S FIRST DECADE: HOW DID WE GET HERE FROM THERE?

The Guide continues, "What has happened is that the huge capacity of a CD-ROM has challenged our imaginations. We're used to thinking about distributing information and programs for personal computers in terms of a few hundred kilobytes or maybe a megabyte. CD-ROM has expanded our capability by over two orders of magnitude! Our imaginations may take a while to catch up." It seems that our imaginations have caught up to and even exceeded the capacity of CD-ROM--or at least our information needs have. Replace CD-ROM with DVD-ROM, however, and megabytes with gigabytes, and the Brady Guide's assessment still applies.

When the book was being written, in late 1986, the High Sierra proposal was under consideration by standards bodies ECMA and NISO, and in 1987, it was approved and adopted as the international standard CD-ROM file system. As stated in the Brady Guide, "The intent of the High Sierra specification is to provide standard levels of compatibility so that a common compatible installed base of systems can develop, and standardized discs can be published for use on those systems. The standardization breaks the bonds of the disc to the specific delivery system for which it was produced, and also may allow for the development of quality retrieval software for various operating systems that may be used with any standard disc." Again, replace High Sierra with DVD, and you have an almost prescient view of what DVD-ROM could be, if its true potential is realized.

In 1987, CD-ROM publishers were faced with the problem of how to introduce a new form of data publishing medium to customers who were perfectly satisfied with the delivery mediums of tape, microfiche, print, and online databases. Some of the publishers in the CD-ROM business in 1987 were Newsbank, SilverPlatter, the H. W. Wilson company, Dialog Information Services, Microsoft, R.R. Bowker, UMI (University Microfilms International), Information Handling Services, and Delorme Mapping Systems. These companies and others who have lost count of the scars inflicted by the first ten years of the CD-ROM publishing industry are seeing déjà vu all over again as they consider making the leap from CD-ROM to DVD.

Chris Andrews, then with Newsbank, now president of both UniDisc, a CD-ROM development company, and Intercast, a production company focusing on live broadcast on the Internet, remembers those days. "There were a multitude of factors involved in the difference between what people were using and CD-ROM," Andrews says. "To demonstrate the advantages of CD-ROM to librarians, I used to go to the library with a system, a disc, and a stopwatch. I'd use the stopwatch to time the same search on paper or fiche and on CD-ROM, and the benefits were immediately obvious. Using CD-ROM compared to paper or microfiche could result in retrieval times as diverse as several minutes compared to 24 hours. If it takes 24 hours, you might as well say, 'You can't do it.' The big difference between going from print to CD-ROM is the difference between 'can't do it' and 'can do it.' Going from several CD-ROMs to one DVD-ROM," he concludes, "is the difference between 'can do it' and 'can do it better.' It's an incremental improvement, not an exponential one."

Andrews sees a difference in the traditional CD-ROM publishers ten years later as well. "These are established companies looking to improve profit margins, not looking to make a killing with a new technology. CD-ROM was a big risk for them, but it brought big returns. With DVD-ROM, they have less to lose."

Todd Enterprises chief information officer Steve Soto, another CD-ROM industry old-timer, remembers CD-ROM's evolution as well. In 1987, Soto was the technical support engineer for a company that had recently changed its name from Videotools to Meridian Data, and changed its focus from video disc development tools to CD-ROM development tools. "We had to demonstrate the technology for people," he recalls. "They wanted to see it--it wasn't enough to ship them software and hardware that would create an image on tape, that they could ship off to a disc manufacturer. Some customers insisted on traveling to our offices at their own expense just to watch the premastering of a disc image."

Soto sees advantages for CD-ROM publishers moving to DVD-ROM beyond the obvious savings in manufacturing one disc in place of two, three, or seven. "The hardest benefits to quantify are the ones that result from more efficient administration," Soto says. "Now, when an order for a multiple disc database comes in, a worker has to go to inventory, find and pull each disc as separate inventory item, pull the documentation, check the package, check the label, and ship it. If all the worker has to pull is one disc and the documentation, it could speed up the process by three to four minutes. That may not seem like much, but it adds up." Soto continues, "One disc also eliminates the potential for mislabeling or incorrectly assembling disc sets, and the cost of storing, packaging, labeling, and shipping for a full DVD-ROM is one-seventh the cost for seven CD-ROMs."

Soto is not blind to DVD-ROM's potential drawbacks, however. He offers the cautionary tale of THOR, a defunct CD-rewritable technology by Tandy. Beginning in 1988, the technology was announced, highly praised, predicted to be a success, and heavily promoted; then it was delayed, and finally, it just never appeared. He gets the feeling DVD could be another THOR, and he is not alone. SilverPlatter, for example, has not only decided not to make the move to DVD-ROM, they are close to abandoning CD-ROM as well. "SilverPlatter wants as many users as possible for their data. They can get that exposure by selling their content on the Internet," says Soto.

But West Publishing, the world's largest publisher of legal materials and one of Todd Enterprises' biggest customers for CD-ROM drives and towers, plans to go DVD-ROM "as soon as they can get their hands on drives," according to Soto. "Standard or not, they don't care what it is as long as it's networkable and the operating system can handle it. They can sell drives or whole systems to their customers, because they have a specialized audience." The drawback here may be in the networkability of DVD-ROM; a set of six discs in six drives on a network, searched by many users, inevitably forms a bottleneck when the same data resides on one disc searched by many users. In the case of a jukebox, where one drive accesses up to six discs, replacing six discs with one disc will actually speed access by eliminating disc swaps.

Meridian Data, which now describes itself as "the CD-ROM networking company," has given this some thought. "We're doing software support for DVD-ROM on a network," says Robert Wise, product manager. "I can't argue with the logic that a single drive is going to be busier than six or seven drives. But most of the search engines try to load in the workstation. The speed of the drive is one of many factors affecting the speed of delivery from a disc on a network. The network is only as fast as the wire, after all. There are no DVD-ROM drives available to test with as yet, so it's hard to say what kind of an effect this will have on speed in a network environment, especially when the search engine varies with each application."

Dataware Technologies, another early CD-ROM developer, plans to join the DVD-ROM early on as well. "We've scaled up our CD Author/CD Answer product for DVD-ROM, and it's faster and more efficient at the higher capacity," according to Pete Jenny, director of systems integration. "We're also introducing a new electronic publishing software called Pegasus, which is capable of addressing 512GB of 'data objects,' including audio, video, text, and other types of data." In 1987, Jenny was the director of engineering at a company called Video Demo Centers. Its product consisted of an "interactive video and CD," a videodisc player running a sales presentation on a television with a scripted software demonstration run simultaneously from a CD-ROM in a computer. "Today, you could do the same thing on one disc with DVD-ROM," Jenny concludes. "Video Demo Centers was ten years ahead of its time."

Another CD-ROM pioneer, Dan Denkin, senior manager of electronics imaging at Information Handling Service (IHS) Group, reminisces about the first ten years of CD-ROM for IHS Group: "In 1986, we had one product on one disc. In 1996, we have 2,000 separate titles, and each one is a multidisc set. The single-disc application we offered in 1986 has grown to five or six discs in ten years. We have one title that uses 300 to 400 discs, and about 60 of the discs in the set are replaced every 60 days." DVD-ROM is a natural progression for IHS Group products, but Denkin says IHS Group isn't in a hurry to adopt the new format. "We intend to wait for a standard," Denkin explains. "We're looking at DVD-ROM as a cost-cutting measure, but we have a lot of customers with a lot of CD-ROM hardware. Obviously, this isn't going to change overnight."

Neil Halava, president of Eagle Computing and a Folio Business Partner, is also cautious about DVD. Eagle currently publishes an 11-disc CD-ROM set that will grow to 12 or 13 discs in its next release, which is scheduled for 1997. The set is a reference database of several hundred megabytes of text of religious material, plus 6GB of multimedia audio files that are tied in and all accessed with the Folio engine. But the product's current installed base of roughly 1,000 users worldwide will inhibit the possibility of migrating the database to DVD, at least for the time being. "We will definitely not go to DVD-ROM until a final standard has been reached," Halava says. "Copy protection is not an issue for us, but changing standards are. If someone starts with DVD and says that it might change when the copy protection issue is finally resolved, we will wait, thank you kindly. However, since we have to wait until the next 9GB generation of DVD, I figure that all these issues will be settled by then."

FROM CD TO DVD: HOW DO WE GET THERE FROM HERE?

In a seven-disc set--likely to be roughly the size of a filled-to-capacity single-layer DVD-ROM--there is usually redundant information on each disc for cross-reference. Each disc will also contain overhead in the form of volume descriptors and file management structures. Therefore, DVD-ROM may represent even more capacity when a multidisc database is merged from several volumes into one. But this brings up other issues, such as optimization, search engine capabilities, and addressing. Are the existing file systems for CD-ROM, ISO 9660, and the operating systems and redirectors (the programs that act as interpreters between the operating system and ISO 9660), capable of handling 4.7GB of data in a single volume?

The answer is yes, and no. ISO 9660, as written, is capable of addressing 4GB of sectors. At 2,048 bytes of user data per sector, that's around eight terabytes of addressable data in a single volume. As written, ISO 9660 is capable of addressing a maximum file size of 4GB. However, in the real-world implementations of ISO 9660, redirectors such as MSCDEX and CDFS are capable of addressing only 2GB of data, and files of up to 2GB in size. This 2GB limitation is not exclusively the property of CD-ROM, however--most operating systems are limited to reading 2GB, minus one byte, to accommodate a 32-bit system. The size of MPEG-2 files for DVD-Video is defined to an artificial 1GB limit, however. It seems the 2GB-minus-one-byte figure was harder to calculate, so the digital video folks who helped define DVD-Video rounded it down to the nearest gigabyte.

The new file system that DVD-ROM will use is officially defined as "ISO 9660 and Micro UDF"; however, there may be good reason to leave ISO 9660 behind when making the move to DVD. UDF is capable of addressing 18 quintillion, or 18 billion billion bytes of data. That seems sufficient for our present, and most of our future needs, certainly. But the real beauty of UDF is that it can offer the true cross-platform universality that ISO 9660 attempted. The High Sierra Group's objectives in developing ISO 9660 include the following:

• Minimize the number of seeks to optimize CD-ROM performance

• Include the possibility of extending the standards to WORM and erasable media

• Ensure compatibility with CD-i

• Ensure the ability to deal with different character sets so that the standard would be worldwide
• Provide for easy implementation with most popular operating systems, such as MS-DOS, VAX-VMS, UNIX, and AxpleDOS

Micro UDF, however, allows for not only multiple-extent files--that is, files with two or more "pieces" located non-contiguously on the disc--but for filenames in mixed case, up to 256 characters long, with no forbidden characters, and with Unicode to support all the world's character sets. All operating systems that support long filenames will see essentially the same filenames on discs formatted in Micro UDF. Micro UDF is also capable of preserving the resource fork and the data fork for Macintosh applications. Best of all, Micro UDF will not require major changes to search engines that are not file system dependent. In other words, just as a search engine that runs under DOS or Windows on a magnetic hard drive will still work when the application is transferred to an ISO 9660 file system on a CD-ROM, so will that search engine work when the application is transferred to a Micro UDF file system on DVD-ROM.

A search engine's performance on a 4.7GB spread of disc real estate might be faster or slower than its performance on seven 650MB parcels, depending upon the search engine. Although there are several DVD-Video authoring packages already on the market, there is not much said about the authoring and premastering of DVD-ROM. Particularly lacking is information about software, services, or utilities for the unique needs of the developer accustomed to breaking his or her dataset into 650MB chunks for distribution, and who now needs to consider how best to present and manipulate those chunks as a cohesive whole.

WHO YA GONNA CALL? DVD-ROM SERVICES AND SOFTWARE

Craig Hansen of Rimage, a bundler of high-end duplication systems, manufacturer of CD-R printers, and developer of software-based duplication products, speculates that tweaking indexing software for DVD-ROM will be an important and perhaps expensive issue for software publishers. "Search engines will have to be greatly improved," he says. "This, as well as addressing and optimization, may ultimately be as expensive to adjust for DVD-ROM as the original conversion of the data from print or microfiche was ten years ago." He sees the early adopters of DVD-ROM as coming from the segment of the software publishing market that either moved to publishing on CD-ROM years ago, or who have never published in another medium. "Most of our customers right now are going from floppy to CD-ROM. They aren't feeling the pinch yet, but they will--we think within two years. Datasets of all types will grow, simply because there is room to grow," he says. Rimage recently added a replication line for CD-ROM, but Hansen says it can be upgraded for DVD-ROM when the need arises.

Jerry Warner says his CD-R service bureau, CD Solutions, is not feeling pressed by its customers to make an immediate move. "DVD reminds me of where CD-ROM was when we entered that market," Warner says. "The equipment was expensive, and most people had never heard of it. Furthermore, when you told them what it was, they thought they'd never need it. Critics say that DVD will be slow to catch on in the consumer markets because consumers will be slow to accept the new technology. But with CD-ROM, I think we have proven that consumers will quickly accept technology that is truly beneficial to them. Once DVD becomes practical, it is my intention to offer that service in addition to our CD-R services."

Media Lab, in Louisville, Colorado, is a multimedia production company that performs multimedia training on software, hardware, and authoring programs, as well as guidance, staffing, and systems development for their clients who want to establish their own in-house multimedia departments. They also perform analog-to-digital video conversion from video cassette to CD-Recordable disc. Their main business, however, is project development for multimedia titles for training, presentations, electronic publishing, and commercial CD-ROM titles. According to the president and founder of Media Lab, Bob Bruce, "We're considering putting together a seminar on DVD. We're very interested in it, and our corporate customers can't wait. We just finished one MPEG-1 video product on three discs. We think DVD-ROM will be great for training videos, and you can fit a lot of MPEG-1 on a DVD-ROM." Bruce's interest is pragmatic, however. "We're evangelists," he says, "and we'd like to evangelize DVD, but we don't want to be made fools of by an industry that has promised so much for so long, and so far has failed to deliver. I think they're hurting themselves by waiting so long--we need to see players and discs."

Rick Hallock, president of Multimedia Technology Center and creator of Rainbow Publisher CD-R software, is working on a DVD-ROM formatter that will include optimization of files for a dual-layer disc. He sees his customers looking to DVD-ROM for purely economic reasons, citing an automotive training application now available on 27 discs in MPEG-1 that will fit on four or five DVD-ROM discs. "I've got a few hundred developers worldwide who I expect will be rattling some cage doors with ports of CD-ROM, CD-i, and Video CD multimedia titles to the DVD-ROM format," Hallock says. "I think this will occur quite soon, as in the end of first quarter 1997."

DVD'S USER DRAW: IF YOU BUILD IT, WILL THEY COME?

There are currently over 100 million CD-ROM drives installed, and zero DVD-ROM drives. Obviously, the case again parallels the early days of CD-ROM, when there were zero CD-ROM drives installed and a CD-ROM publisher's goal was by necessity compelled to overcome a customer's allegiance to whatever other medium--tape, online, microfiche, or print--contained the information newly available on a silver platter. Now, the customer's allegiance to CD-ROM is the hurdle, but what must be demonstrated is not the superiority of a CD-ROM over print, tape, or microfiche--no contest, in most cases--but the superiority of a single disc over seven. CD-ROM is going to be a tough act to follow. So how does a publisher transfer loyalty from CD-ROM to DVD-ROM? Historical precedents can serve as good examples.

Early CD-ROM publishers found it expedient to underwrite the cost of a CD-ROM drive or an entire system and include it in the price of a yearly subscription to a CD-ROM database. With early CD-ROM drives in the $1000 to $1500 range, this was no small commitment, but it paid off. UniDisc's Chris Andrews sees this as an attractive incentive. "I can see the appeal to a librarian if you offered a single drive with a single disc and told him or her the seven-drive CD-ROM tower could be used for another application," Andrews says. "I imagine users would get accustomed pretty quickly to the benefits of added capacity and less hardware." This turnkey solution will work best with CD-ROM publishers in vertical markets such as legal, governmental, library, and specialized business markets.

Others say including a "free" drive will be too expensive. As Dataware's Pete Jenny says, "Many of our customers lived through the old 'buy the drive with the disc,' and so did we--it doesn't work. Support for the drives and installation eats up profits." Rick Hallock agrees. "The answer is make it economically desirable by passing the manufacturing savings along to the customer," he says. This approach was not always practical for CD-ROM because CD-ROM developers had to recoup the costs of conversion from other media to CD-ROM but, fortunately, the value added by random electronic access, frequent updates, and miniaturization was immediately observable. For CD-ROM database publishers, however, who will continue to publish CD-ROM databases in addition to DVD, the pricing of the two formats must be somewhat equitable in order to establish that the product sold is the content, not the medium. But when the two mediums are so similar in appearance, the added value may be harder to define. Is one disc with the contents of seven discs worth more or less than seven discs?

IMPEDIMENTS TO A MASS DVD MIGRATION: WHAT'S STOPPING YOU?

The final specification for DVD-ROM is finished except for decisions on regional control and copy protection. Nonetheless, the specification is being offered as "Version 1.0." Surely this is not the first time the definition of "final spec" has been flouted to name what is no better than a draft, in the absence of these crucial definitions. Some sources close to the DVD Consortium expect no final answers on copy protection for as long as another year, and others say the agreement could happen any day. Despite six months of repeated assurances of an agreement "real soon now," however, resolution remains elusive.

Another potential drawback of going to DVD-ROM is the lack of an analogous development medium that serves the purpose CD-R serves for CD-ROM development. Although DVD-R is expected soon, and will perhaps debut at or near the same time that DVD-ROM drives do, its initial capacity will be "only" 3.9GB--not large enough to provide space to beta test and ship input for the largest applications, but perfectly serviceable for existing CD-ROM titles that span six discs or fewer. Even so, DVD-R will be expensive, just as CD-R was in its early years.

The lack of a CD-based beta testing and input medium did not stop the early publishers on CD-ROM, though, and it will not stop the early publishers on DVD. Although DLT tape is the preferred input medium for DVD-Video, there are other options, such as CD-R. Early CD-ROM publishers often used six nine-track tape reels to transport a CD-ROM disc image to replication plants. If a publisher could not afford a nine-track tape drive, he or she used removable or fixed hard drives, MO cartridges, or even, in some rare cases, floppy discs.

Sending in seven CD-Rs instead of a single DLT tape is not such a far-fetched idea, especially when one considers another of the features of the Micro UDF file system. Micro UDF can span the physical boundaries of media, so that a set of seven CD-R discs--or 10, or 20, or 50, or 100--can be addressed as a single volume. This would not only allow CD-R to be used as an input medium for DVD-R--with the appropriate Micro UDF premastering software included in the CD-Recordable software packages used--but it would provide a means of testing the application from a stack of CD-ROM drives before packing it off to the plant.

Before the days of CD-R, there was an expensive option available to those who desired to "see" their CD-ROM application before it was forever etched in polycarbonate, with some mastering and replication facilities offering CD-ROMs on glass substrates for testing purposes. The analogous 1997 option for beta testing of DVD-ROM is DirectCut, a "DVD one-off" service available from Optical Disc Corporation. This process creates a single-prototype DVD on a glass substrate, using ODC's Direct Read After Write (DRAW) dye polymer mastering technology, and the glass disc can be played back on a DVD-ROM drive. Another expensive 1987 possibility was having a "short run" of CD-ROMs pressed in polycarbonate prior to commissioning an order for thousands, and this has its 1997 equivalent as well: Warner Advanced Media Operations (WAMO) and Pioneer Video Manufacturing are both taking orders for DVD test runs from DLT input.

INTO THE WILD BLUE YONDER

Work is proceeding apace on the development of the mythical blue-green and blue-purple lasers needed for the next step in high-density discs. Toshiba, Philips, and Sony all provided demos of blue lasers in 1996, but none to date has functioned longer than three hours in the laboratories. Assuming their life spans can be extended, the next generation of DVD will have a capacity of 15GB per side, with yet another reduction in disc pit size and track pitch. These lasers are projected to be in commercial production by the turn of the century.

Just as certainly as the 500MB offered by CD-ROM went from an embarrassment of capacity to cramped quarters in just a few years, the almost unimaginable extent of 17GB of data space will someday seem too small. Even if that day is closer for DVD-Video applications--as is evidenced by the advice of DVD Video authoring software vendors to start with a "bit budget" for audio and video streams to avoid running out of disc room--it is coming for DVD-ROM applications too. The only question is how long it will take to get here. At the rate things are moving, it won't be another ten years.

MSCDEX, cursed by many and loved by few, has a built-in limitation; it is incapable of addressing a volume of information larger than 2GB. CDFS, the replacement for MSCDEX in the first commercial version of Windows 95, is only capable of addressing 2GB as well. Microsoft has released a version of CDFS that will read more than 2GB, but how much more is as yet unclear. According to Peter Biddle of Microsoft Corporation's Windows Hardware Platform Group, the new CDFS will address a "very, very big volume of data, certainly greater than 17GB. It's probably somewhere in the terabytes or beyond. Windows 95 can address a single file as big as 4GB."

The CDFS upgrade, though, is an OEM release, and only available on new computer systems with Windows 95 bundled. That leaves the 40 million or so installed base of Windows 95 out in the cold as far as ISO 9660 DVD-ROM access is concerned, but it is certain that the next release version of Windows 95--which may or may not be called Windows 97 and which is scheduled to reach the retailer's shelf in the first half of its eponymous year--will include not only DVD-ROM support in the form of the beefed-up CDFS, but UDF support in the presence of a UDF reader called UDFS.

Biddle says, "We are considering publishing on DVD-ROM now; there are some titles which are obviously natural for the medium and which wouldn't take much to release for DVD. When it makes sense for us to ship on DVD, we will be there. We view this as an inevitability."--Dana J. Parker

Companies Mentioned in This Article

CD Solutions/Interactive Training, Inc.
111 Speen Street, Suite 202, Framingham, MA 01701-9107;
508/879-0006; Fax 508/820-4396;
http://www.cds.com

Dataware
222 Third Street, Suite 3300, Cambridge, MA 02142;
617/621-0820; Fax 617/621-0307;
http://www.dataware.com

IHS Group
Inverness Business Park, 15 Inverness Way East, Englewood, CO 80112;
303/790-0600, 800/320-4555; Fax 303/754-4040;
http://www.personnet.com

Media Lab Inc.
400 South McCaslin Boulevard #211, Louisville, CO 80027;
303/499-5411, 800/282-5361; Fax 303/665-0827;
http://www.medialab.com

Meridian Data
5615 Scotts Valley Drive, Scotts Valley, CA 95066;
408/438-3100; Fax 408/438-6816;
http://www.meridian-data.com

MultiMedia Technology Center
432 North Main Street, Herkimer, NY 13350;
315/866-4639; Fax 315/866-4709;
http://www.mitsuigold.com

Optical Disc Company
12150 Mora Drive, Santa Fe Springs, CA 90670;
310/946-3050; Fax 310/946-6030;
76712.3036@compuserve.com

Pioneer New Media Technologies, Inc.
2265 E. 220th Street, Long Beach, CA 90810;
800/444-6784, 310/952-2111; Fax 310/952-2990;
http://www.pioneerusa.com

Software Architects
19102 N. Creek Parkway, Suite 101, Bothell, WA 98011;
206/487-0122; Fax 206/487-0467;
http://www.softarch.com

Todd Enterprises, Inc.
31 Water Mill Lane, Great Neck, NY 11021;
516/487-3976; Fax 516/466-6774;
http://www.toddent.com

UniDisc Inc./Intercast Inc.
260 Sheridan Avenue, Suite 410, Palo Alto,
CA 94306; 415/328-7187; Fax 415/328-7188;
http://www.incast.com

WEA Manufacturing, Inc.
375 Hudson Street, 7th Floor, New York,
NY 10014; 212/741-1404; Fax 212/243-8255;
warner_mediaservices@wmg.com

Dana J. Parker is a Denver, Colorado-based independent consultant and writer, and a Contributing Editor for EMedia Professional. She is also regular columnist for Standard Deviations and a Contributing Editor to Knowledge Industry Publications' DVD Report. She is the co-author of CD-ROM Professional's CD-Recordable Handbook (Pemberton Press, 1996).

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