CD‐ROM publishing systems
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/eb045049 |
| Published date | 01 February 1991 |
| Pages | 97-103 |
| Date | 01 February 1991 |
| Author | Howard Falk |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Library & information science |
Hardware Corner
CD-ROM publishing
systems
Howard Falk
135
Watchung
Avenue,
Montclair,
NJ
07043,
USA
Several systems, ranging in price from about $30 000 to over
$200 000, are now available to aid database publishers and
other organizations in disseminating information products on
CD-ROM media.
The conventional route to CD-ROM publication has been
to collect and format the information for an application on a
tape master, which is then sent to a specialized vendor who
produces a CD-ROM master and presses multiple CD-ROM
copies for playback on CD-ROM readers. While each of the
copies is relatively inexpensive to produce, production setup
costs may be $2000 to $8000 for a single CD-ROM master. If
only a few copies are being made, the setup cost per copy will
be prohibitively high. In addition, the vendor may require
considerable lead time to produce the copies.
A relatively inexpensive CD-ROM publishing system de-
signed to produce only master tapes (tape-only system) is de-
scribed below.
An alternative method is to use a production system to
create one or more write-once optical discs, which can then
be immediately played back on ordinary CD-ROM readers.
Most of the CD-ROM production systems designed to pro-
duce write-once discs are also equipped to turn out master
tapes which can be used by vendors to produce conventional
CD-ROM copies. However, disc-only systems are also
available.
Write-once recording equipment from Yamaha has been
used in these production systems for the past few years and
discs for this equipment cost $200 or more apiece. Recently,
Toshiba write-once equipment has become available, using
discs which cost $165 per single disc ($100 in quantity).
Maximum recording time for these discs is currently 58
minutes,
expected to increase soon
to 74
minutes.
The Optical
Products Division of Sony Corporation announced in late
1990 that it will release production equipment which uses
write-once discs selling for $40 each.
The cost of write-once discs
is
clearly decreasing, and as it
does,
write-once disc production systems will become in-
creasingly useful, allowing moderate numbers of optical disc
copies to be produced at reasonable prices.
Package and system for tape-only production
Reference Bench software ($12 000), from Reference Tech-
nology,
Inc.,
provides the initial processing needed to prepare
a tape containing text and images for
a
CD-ROM application.
The tape itself is prepared by the Reference Technology CD
Simulator System.
Reference Bench, which runs on 286 or 386 computers
under MS-DOS 3.3 or
higher,
is used
to
convert and index text
and images for recording on CD-ROMs. The Reference
Bench software accepts text from optical character recogni-
tion equipment, or text from wordprocessors such as Word-
Perfect or Microsoft
Word,
or standard ASCII text, then auto-
matically adds SGML (Standard Generalized Markup
Language) tags to indicate new documents, headers, para-
graphs, figures and tables.
Text information, including SGML
tags,
is indexed by the
software. All words, except those on a defined stop list, are
indexed for AND, OR, proximity, phrase and wildcard
searching. A searchable key can be 32 kb or larger and there
can be over 64 000 key fields per
record.
Indexed documents
may be up to 16 Mb in size. An outline of SGML-tagged
The Electronic Library,
Vol.
9,
No.
2,
April
1991
_97
To continue reading
Request your trial