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Interactive multimedia is rapidly becoming a competitive force within a variety of industries: communications, entertainment, education, software engineering, broadcasting, and publishing. Due to its novelty and multidisciplinary background, there are currently no established design models and methods formulated specifically for interactive multimedia production and no intrinsic aesthetic identity. Product design and development relies largely on expedient mixtures of traditional practices and methods, which are proving to be inadequate to enable the paradigm shift which should be taking place. Research has shown that these interactive multimedia products generally provide a low level of satisfaction to the user: '...users find most titles uniformly bland [and] boring...all titles tend to look and feel the same' (GISTICS 1995). Peter Girardi, of Voyager, interactive multimedia developers, describes the majority of CD-ROMs as 'shovelware' - 'the result of companies simply spooning their books on to CD-ROM' (Baglee, 1996).
Given that the CD-ROM market is flooded with this 'shovelware' (Mok 1996), few title publishers are likely to make any profit in products so fundamentally flawed (GISTICS 1995). These problems are compounded by the number of titles available and the cost of development, causing a crisis in the multimedia publishing industry; while the sale of CD-ROM drives and CD-ROMs continues to increase, this is still nowhere large enough to satisfy the many thousands of titles being produced. With the majority of titles being sold coming from the games sector, it is the home reference and edutainment markets where the problems lie; these titles are very expensive to produce and developers are unlikely to recoup these costs from the average sales figures per title.
'A half-way decent title can cost as much as £500,000...the average sale of each title in the UK is no more than 2,000 copies, of the 10-12,000 titles now available...To recoup the costs of a £500,000 title, a publisher needs to sell well over 20,000 copies. (Edward Forward of Durlacher Multimedia, Independent on Sunday 20/10/96).
The effect of this has been seen recently in the latter half of 1996 amongst leading UK multimedia producers: First Information Group axed most of its staff, Dorling Kindersley (DK) reduced their multimedia department by 50 freelance staff, and Penguin, Harper Collins and Marshall Cavendish have all withdrawn from CD-ROM publishing. However, DK have diversified their electronic publishing by creating an on-line division. This has set up a web site containing information on DK products and web links to enhance their CD-ROM titles enabling buyers of their products to access updates and additional information. Current work at DK is focusing on an on-line magazine for the site and an exploration of the potential for on-line products to generate revenue (Cady 1996). Whilst many publishers now have their own web sites, the majority are used as a marketing tool and advertising space rather than as a distribution mechanism for dedicated on-line products. Increased interest in the internet as a mechanism for distribution and communication has enabled a large number of small companies to compete successfully in the electronic publishing arena, e.g. Obsolete, Pure Dimensions, AMX Digital, Nash Media, and AL Digital.
This general movement towards on-line media illustrates the complexity of the paradigm shift in publishing. Given this crisis, and the rapidly changing delivery environment it is necessary to reassess the design constraints and practices of the old technologies, in order to improve the design and production of products so that they can exploit the full potential of non-linear environments.
