_From Alice To Ocean: Alone Across the Outback_
Taped to the back of this visually stunning book about a 27-year-old Aussie's lunatic trek across the outback (accompanied by a few camels and a dog) are two CD-ROM discs and a letter from Rick Smolan, the force behind the Day in The Life series of coffee-table ornaments.
"The two CD discs tucked into the back of this book are demonstrations of an exciting new form of publishing," Smolan writes. Indeed they are. The discs, one for the new Kodak Photo CD player and another for the Macintosh CD player, provide an entirely new way of understanding Robyn Davidson's odyssey.
Throughout the CD version of the book, Davidson's Australian drawl reads to us from her best-selling and well-written book Tracks. While the layout and interactive features of the CD-ROM are compelling, the Apple CD is by nature slow, and you are left pining for some kind of fast forward feature (we did not look at the Photo CD version).
The promotional nature of the book might also leave you a little cold: if you don't own a Photo CD player, the letter urges you to run down to your "local consumer electronics dealer" and ask them to play it for you. Yeah, right. And when you quit the Mac version, a promotional window comes up informing you the program was created in Macromedia's Director, and just in case, here's the software company's phone number.
According to the publisher, _From Alice To Ocean: Alone Across the Outback_ is the first book to include CD-ROM discs. For a first effort, this project is remarkably well done.
_From Alice to Ocean_, 1992, $49.95 from Addison Wesley, 800-447-2226.
STREET CRED
The Machines Take Over War in the Age of Intelligent Machines Homebrew VR
Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier
A Book You Can Start Anywhere
The Law Catches Up
