The Disc of Knowledge : San Diego-Based IVID Goes High-Tech With World Book Encyclopedia

For 73 years, door-to-door salesmen for World Book Encyclopedia have been making a living hauling their bulky wares to schools, libraries and homes.

But the load last month became lighter for the 42,000 salesmen nationwide who peddle the 22-volume compendium of information. Thanks to the work of a San Diego-based company called IVID Communications, the entire set from A to Z is now available on a compact disc that weighs less than an ounce and can fit inside a shirt pocket.

The encyclopedia salesmen--who will continue to haul the paper version for home demonstrations--aren’t the only ones celebrating. Those who track the compact disc industry say the introduction of general-interest compact disc products bodes well for a nascent industry that hardly existed before 1985 but that has since seen tremendous growth.

“The fact that these larger companies are putting their encyclopedias and more general information . . . on compact disc shows that they have confidence the market is growing into the consumer realm,” said Richard Bowers, executive director of the Optical Publishing Assn. in Columbus, Ohio.

The shiny, palm-size platter that contains the electronic encyclopedia appears identical to the audio compact discs that growing numbers of music listeners are choosing over old-fashioned vinyl records and cassette tapes.

But the kind of compact discs that hold printed information are actually different. Called CD-ROM, for compact disc-read only memory, they are imprinted differently than the musical ones, and must be played on a special kind of disc player--costing at least $600--that hooks up to a personal computer.

In 1988, the most recent year for which figures are available, worldwide sales of such computer-readable compact discs rose to $280 million, while hardware sales reached $101 million, both up about 400% from 1987, according to statistics published by the Optical Publishing Assn. Figures for 1989, though not yet compiled, are expected to reflect a growth rate of 200% over 1988.

“Is the encyclopedia going to change the world? No. But it’s going to give people another reason to buy CD-ROM drives and give manufacturers another reason to incorporate CD-ROM drives in personal computers,” said Ben Huston, a software analyst at Montgomery Securities.

World Book’s Information Finder is not the first encyclopedia to be made available on compact disc, nor is it the glitziest. Compton’s Multimedia Encyclopedia, which is produced by competitor Encyclopaedia Britannica and retails for $795, features pictures and sounds for some of the entries.

By contrast, the Information Finder, which has only text and graphics and retails for about $549, seems downright boring.

When Compton’s debuted in September, newspapers nationwide carried stories about the electronic encyclopedia’s amazing feats. Type in an entry for Mozart and a few bars of the composer’s music pipe through the computer’s speaker. An entry on John F. Kennedy comes complete with a recording of his inaugural speech.

But Jack Spiegelberg, president of IVID Communications and co-founder with Steve Holder in 1986 of the San Diego company responsible for designing Information Finder, said that relatively few people own computers that are capable of playing pictures and sounds and that such features would have made his product more costly.

“We felt we wanted to be sure we reached everybody that was out there and not have a product that would only work on the high end of all the machines,” Spiegelberg said. Future versions of the encyclopedia complete with sound and images may be made when the equipment becomes more standard on computers, he said.

Some analysts doubt that IVID and World Book and its competitors will make much money on the CD-ROM encyclopedia for the time being, simply because few people have the necessary hardware to play the discs. They predict it will be at least three years before CD-ROM disc drives even begin to compete with floppy drives as standard data storage devices in personal computers.

Although compact discs have about 600 times the memory capacity of a standard floppy disc, users cannot practically write or erase data on them as they can on floppies.

World Book spokeswoman Patricia Higgins Crane said librarians have been asking for years when a compact disc version of the encyclopedia would be available, but “we really took a wait-and-see attitude in developing our CD-ROM products because we wanted to be sure it was a good one.”

Since it did not have any computer programmers on staff capable of taking on such a task, World Book turned to IVID Communications, which specializes in using existing technology to create compact disc products for such diverse clients as AT&T;, Nissan and the Navy.

IVID Communications, which logged $1.5 million in revenue last year, up from about $600,000 the year before, has won several awards for its interactive video products, including one titled “Understanding Cordless Phones,” a training video for AT&T;’s sales staff.

Spiegelberg, 41, studied applied physics and information sciences at UC San Diego and spent seven years working for Scripps Institution of Oceanography as a computer programmer before deciding to set out on his own.

World Book and Spiegelberg both declined to say how much the encyclopedia company spent on creating its compact disc product. World Book executives talked to six companies before settling on IVID, which was paid a fee for the work but will not receive royalties on sales.

The conversion of the World Book Encyclopedia into compact disc form was made easier by the fact that the paper version has been in a mainframe computer for years, thus the information did not have to be re-entered into a computer system.

Working from 9-inch magnetic tape reels containing the encyclopedia text as well as the World Book Dictionary, it took Spiegelberg and partner Steve Holder two years to design the computer format by which users can call up encyclopedia entries.

The company, which normally employs 10 full-time people, had 45 workers on the payroll as the completion date for the project neared.

When the raw text was finally converted into a form that could be read by a compact disc laser, the tapes were sent to a laboratory in Charlotte, N.C., where the master disc and subsequent copies were cut. The entire encyclopedia and dictionary take up no more than a third of each compact disc, each copy of which costs about $2 to make.

An early version of the encyclopedia was tested for seven months in 12 schools nationwide to see how children would use the encyclopedia. Thanks to a program that tracked every keystroke made, IVID computer programmers learned something any grade school librarian could have told them: Children first look up dirty words before moving on to other interests.

Although no studies exist comparing the three electronic encyclopedias now on the market (the third is Grollier’s), librarians interviewed said cost considerations, as always, determine what the library will eventually acquire.

Judith Sherwood, who heads the history section of the San Diego Central Library, said the World Book’s CD-ROM product is priced attractively. “It’s on my list of things I would like to buy but probably don’t have the funds for.”