Click- And Ye Shall Find

Israelis have always treasured an exalted image of themselves as voracious readers. While there are those who dispute this image - recent studies indicate that average Israelis spend half their leisure time in front of a television set - Israel's conventional book publishing industry is nonetheless one of the world's largest on a per capita basis.* Reading levels have not appreciably declined over the past 20 years, despite the appeals of the mass media - possibly a posthumous comfort to Israel's first prime minister, David Ben Gurion who had opposed the introduction of television into Israeli society. Crowds still throng the stalls at the annual Hebrew Book Week, and large numbers of young, talented writers surface on a regular basis.

But there is now something new, or at least different under the publishing sun. Taking their place alongside the makers of conventional books are a new breed of Israeli publishers: producers of CD-ROM discs. At the 1995 Jerusalem International Book Fair, not only did electronic publishers have a large pavilion to themselves, but it was also one of the most frequented. And if Israel remains a giant step behind the United States in this fledgling industry, it may well be ahead of virtually everyone else. Most Israeli firms are producing for export, mostly to the United States, and although final figures are not available, revenues for 1995 are expected to reach $50 million. Some estimates maintain that there are as many as 80 Israeli firms producing CD-ROMs - all it takes is some crawl space, a couple of computers and a company is born. But in an industry where shelf space is at a premium - overstocks may be returned to the producer within a few short weeks - companies quick to open are often even quicker to fold.

But there are survivors, and there are firms that are thriving. It is conceivable that at the time of reading this article, some of the firms mentioned might have gone out of business; it is just as likely that new ones will have started up. Although Israel has so far contributed only about two to three dozen titles to the tens of thousands on the market (many of these being mindless games), among them are best-sellers, some have received international awards and there have been rave reviews. With many more titles in the works, Israel is attracting the attention of international publishers and software developers.

Take Superstudio, the Horatio Alger of the Israeli multimedia CD-ROM industry. 14 years ago Seth Altholz and Shelly Abrahami, two American immigrants now in their late thirties, opened a graphics design company. Recognizing the possibilities of applying their design skills to the newly-developing multimedia technology, they bought their first sound- and video-capable Macintosh system in 1989. After a few years of producing multimedia corporate presentations and hands-on museum applications (the Israel Museum Youth Wing was one of their clients), Altholz and Abrahami were ready to become independent producers in their own right. It was around this time that CD-ROMs were becoming a viable product.

Not more than four years-old, the CD-ROM revolution had its roots in the discovery of additional uses for compact discs, which were initially developed to store music in the form of digital information, substantially improving the quality of recordings. But with the standard CD's 640 megabytes (ROM stands for Read Only Memory, which means data can only be accessed, not added to) CDs are capable of storing 640,000 pages of text. In 1989, an American, Harry Fox, introduced the first multimedia personal computer for Philips. Recognizing Israel's technological and creative potential, Fox was among the first foreigners to approach Israeli multimedia developers, including Superstudio and was, in fact, very much responsible for spurring the industry here.

With the development of interactive media, a happy symbiosis took place and the CD became a storage medium not only of texts, but of audio commentaries, music, videos, film footage and animation. A mere click of the mouse and the user can visit a virtual city, zooming in on places of interest, write musical notes and hear them, and call up data which once meant days of library research. Put to good use, CD-ROMs offer unlimited access to information in an entertaining way.

Despite a great deal of media hype, most developers admit that it is only a matter of time before the internet turns CD-ROM, as a multimedia carrier, into an anachronism. Much of a company's success depends on its ability to adapt itself to an industry where changes occur on an almost daily basis. ("A month in this business is like a year for conventional book publishers," was how one developer described the situation.) For example, Superstudio's products are already available on-line, and since it was recently acquired by Softkey, a NASDAQ-traded software company, Superstudio - with over 175 employees - has become the largest multimedia development company in the Middle East and Europe.

Superstudio's first product, "Leonardo the Inventor" won the 1994 CD-ROM Today Magazine Rommie Award. It received favourable reviews in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and was recently released in an enhanced, updated edition. The first in the company's "intelliquest edutainment" series, the disc focuses on Leonardo da Vinci's startling designs found in his notebooks, foreshadowing such modern inventions as the helicopter, drawbridge, deep-sea diving suit, and even water skis. Click on "inventions" and find Mona Lisa on the top of the screen with five icons below: flight, water, music, civil engineering and warfare. If you click on "flight," the airplane in the icon takes off and Mona Lisa's eyes follow it. The screen then offers a choice of pedal-powered wing, landing gear, parachute and helicopter. Opt for pedal-powered wing and listen - emphasis here on listen - to an introduction, read the relevant pages from Leonardo's notebooks, and view animations and video clips of early flying machines, some successful, some not.

With the user in control, "Leonardo the Inventor" also includes biographical sections, a brief review of the artist's work, a time-line matching world event's to the inventor's life, and a bibliography. Geared for ages 11 and up, other products in Superstudio's IntelliQuest series include "The Genius of Edison," "Explorers of the New World" (travel the world with Christopher Columbus, Hernando Cortes and Ferdinand Magellan), "Artrageous," a hands-on art appreciation CD ("kids introduce their parents to Goya and Renoir and not the other way around," says Altholz), and "Pathways to Jerusalem."

Superstudio's Jerusalem title is more the exception than the rule for a company whose products are not easily identifiable as either Jewish or Israeli. Using live actors, "Pathways" offers a tour of Jerusalem by nine different guides, from King David to Herod to Queen Helena and Suleiman the Magnificent, each representing a different cultural background and point in time. Winner of "Mac User Magazine's" Four Mice Award, "Pathways" is comprised of over 500 photographs, more than 600 animations, 200 video clips and hours of narration. Users are able to stop at certain sites and access related information.

That nine out of the ten measures of beauty fell on Jerusalem was not lost on other Israeli producers of interactive CD-ROMs. If the city's rich cultural and religious history provide the perfect material for a multimedia presentation, the tri-millennium celebrations added an extra impetus. Several Jerusalem CD-ROMs are already on the shelves, each with its own focus. Which actually survives has as much to do with marketing strategies and timing as with the product's artistic and technological merits.

Glyph, a small subsidiary of Abba Computers, has come up with "Jerusalem 3000: a celebration souvenir." The city's 3000 year history, its relevance to the three major monotheistic religions, its portrayal in the arts and a catalogue of the city's notables, "Jerusalem 3000" also provides a unique interactive map of the city and lists where to eat, where to stay, what sites to visit and where to go if you break your leg - making this a practical electronic guide to the eternal city.

Taking a completely different approach, a Tel-Aviv based company, together with Simon and Schuster Interactive, has issued "Jerusalem: An Interactive Pilgrimage to the Holy City." A Christian journey through Jerusalem's history, this CD-ROM includes a behind-the-scenes look at the last days of Jesus and a Jerusalem juke box, with musical scores from different periods.

What could be more natural than Judaica multimedia issuing forth from Zion? Israeli publishers have long been the world's main source of books of a Jewish nature, from religious texts to the more secular, including archaeology, Jewish history, guide books and, of course, the Arab-Israel conflict. Exploiting the CD's incredible storage capacity, major Jewish textual sources - including the Mishnah, Talmud and rabbinic commentaries and literature - have been put on CD-ROM by Jerusalem's C.D.I. Systems, who have also published Juridisc, a comprehensive legal reference CD-ROM containing the official Laws of the State of Israel (LSI) and Israeli high court decisions. But these products basically amount to textual compression with excellent hyperlink - that is, electronic cross-referencing - applications. As for interactive multimedia, so far, there are not that many Jewish-content CD-ROMs out there.

It is a simple equation, explains one Israeli producer: There are only 13 million Jews worldwide and only a relatively small (but growing) percentage have CD-ROM drive capability on their personal computers. Producing Jewish or Israeli-oriented CD-ROMs does not yet make good business sense. (There are educational companies such as the Centre for Educational Technology - part of the Open University and Gesher, an organization dedicated to bridging the gap between religious and secular youth, who are producing in Hebrew, mostly for the Israeli school system.) However, there are also firms out to prove that premise wrong, or simply spread the good word, without the profit motive.

"Welcome to Ami, where you will learn about Jewish history, culture and tradition by exploring Israel's Declaration of Independence." So begins "Ami, My People," an edutainment developed by Melitz, the Hebrew acronym for Centers for Jewish-Zionist Education, a non-partisan, educational institute based in Jerusalem. Melitz focuses on outreach programmes and "Ami" does that by using a language and technology that American Jewish youth will feel comfortable with.

It is the users' mission - the disc is aimed primarily at teenagers - to figure out what the framers of the Declaration meant when they used certain terms, including immigration, Bible, the Jewish people and the Zionist movement. For example "Rock of Israel" was a compromise worked out by orthodox signers who thought the Declaration should mention God, and secular, who wanted to leave their trust in man alone. To find the right answer, users explore the Syrian-African Rift, the "rock" on which Israel sits; visit archaeological sites; and meet and hear some of Israel's rock groups.

Also aimed at promoting interest in Israel and things Jewish, JeMM productions is publishing a multimedia quarterly magazine, CD-JeMM. Challenging the very concept of what constitutes a magazine or journal, CD-JeMM cannot be leafed through in bed, read on a bus or skimmed in a doctor's office. For the producers of CD-JeMM, "the challenge is finding a truly innovative blend of text and live' media - music, video and animation."

Each issue is actually three magazines, CD-JeMM, Teen JeMM and Kids' JeMM. CD-JeMM follows a conventional magazine format - they have content agreements with publications, such as the Jerusalem Report, Eretz and Moment magazines - and include a cover story, features, arts and leisure, interviews and even advertisements. But there is much more involved than simply text-on-screen. Take CD-JeMM's first cover story: the topic was the thorny issue of the Golan Heights and the magazine opens with a provocative editorial by the Jerusalem Report's editor-in-chief Hirsh Goodman (he is actually on screen talking to the reader-cum-user). Aside from the presentation of different political views, the piece includes 3-D graphs illustrating the region's strategic importance, maps and actual scenic footage, including the country's major water sources. The full texts of the Oslo accords and peace treaty with Jordan can be accessed.

Not surprisingly in this tri-millenial year, CD JeMM's third issue (the second focused on the high cost of Jewish living in the United States), was dedicated to Jerusalem. In one segment the previous mayor, the legendary Teddy Kollek, introduces viewers to his private photo collection; there is a tour of the tunnels alongside the Western Wall and a display of children's drawings of Jerusalem from around the world.

The staff at JeMM mostly come from the field of education and admit to being ambivalent about multimedia in general. But they are realistic. With adults becoming increasingly hooked on cyberspace, and children and teens fixated on video games, the creators of CD-JeMM see multimedia as an opportunity to say something important about the Jewish experience. "To engage subscribers not only visually and virtually," says Danny Paller, creative director of CD-JeMM, "but intellectually as well."

CD-JeMM's target audience, like most producers of Jewish-related CD-ROMs, is the estimated 500,000 Jewish households in the United States with CD-ROM drive capability. "We are losing in terms of the battle for the mind," says company president Meir Fachler, referring to the high rate of intermarriage in the United States. JeMM productions has also produced a CD-ROM animated Haggadah for Passover and is working on "Eyewitness to the Holocaust," a massive multimedia reference undertaking.

The Encyclopaedia Judaica is another reference project currently in the works. A small Jerusalem-based company, Judaica Multimedia, acquired English-language electronic rights to the 17-volume tome and accompanying yearbooks from the Keter Publishing House and plan to release it on a single disk before the end of 1996. The CD-ROM will include animated maps (the migration of the Jewish people, for example); video clips (the liberation of Jerusalem, the Eichmann trial); original slide presentations (the Jews of Morocco) and, of course, music and narration.

As with the case of book publishing, the Holy Land appears to be fertile ground for the production of CD-ROMs with a clear but not necessarily Jewish connection to the Land of Israel. As with the Jerusalem Pilgrimage CD, some firms are setting their sights on a much larger marketplace than the Jewish world. "The Dead Sea Scrolls Revealed," developed by Pixel, a Tel Aviv firm working in cooperation with London's Aaron Witkin Associates (with licensing by the Israel Antiquities Department), includes 80 minutes of original videos and 3-D computer graphics of a reconstructed Qumran Fortress (the site where many of the scrolls were found) and the Temple in Jerusalem.

Click! a subsidiary of Pixel is looking at the Christian faith. "A Disciple's Diary: From Nazareth to Jerusalem," describes the daily life in Palestine at the time of Jesus, using video, 3-D animation, still images, texts (including three versions of the New Testament) and interactive games. Pixel, together with Jerusalem's Virtual Arts, have produced "Follow that Sleigh," a clay animation disc for Christmas with original scores, including reggae versions of "Jingle Bells."

With ever-more sophisticated communication systems shrinking the world, there is little to distinguish many of the CD-ROM titles coming out of Israel from anywhere else. Israel has become a world player catering to the vast tastes of the marketplace. Pixel's first commercial CD-ROM was the "1994 Multimedia Sports Almanac," which won the 1994 bronze award of New Media Magazine. Seeing sports as a potential bestseller, Pixel, together with Nederlander Communications and the Bertelsmann Music Group of Germany have formed a joint venture - RealTime Sports. They have agreements with all the major American sports leagues and have so far produced "The Official National Football League Interactive Yearbook," with on-line services and the "NFL Seventh Anniversary CD-ROM Edition."

Pixel Multimedia evolved out of the the 120-employee Pixel Group which works in animation (Pixel has the largest silicon graphics studio in Israel), 3-D graphics, television and multimedia advertising, techniques all applicable to CD-ROM technology. Pixel and their affiliates have distribution deals with many developers and publishers, for example, a three-title joint venture with HarperCollins: "A Cartoon Guide to Physics" by cartoonist Larry Gonick and physicist Art Hoffman is the first title in the series, to be followed with one on magic and another on the American West. Not all Israeli companies are so large and established. That does not preclude success at finding the right niche in this highly competitive market. Virtual Arts, which began operating in one of the partner's Jerusalem apartment produced what many consider to be Israel's finest state-of-the-art discs, "The Martial Arts Explorer." Listed by PC Magazine as one of the Top CD-ROMs of 1995, and recipient of New Media Magazine's Invision Award in the category of best interface, this disc restores, as one reviewer put it, "some of the grace that the media has robbed from these ancient art forms." The title character is a wise man who travels to the Far East to study the martial arts, and the disc features videos and articles about the techniques, history and philosophy of twelve martial arts styles. Filmed in New York with multiple cameras, the masters' combat techniques are digitalized into a virtual reality. The disc also holds a computer-generated island whose virtual art galleries hold works chosen by Jacob Pins, a well-known Jerusalem artist and collector of Asian art. There is a model of man's vital points, a 5,000 year time-line, and even a grade-B action film. Two more martial arts titles are in production, after which, says company president Eno Segal, they plan to wait and see how the market reacts.

Working on the basic premise that people need to eat and cookbooks tend to sell well, Arome, a Ramat Gan firm is producing a CD cookery series, "Art de la Table." Six savoury titles are already out in English, French, German and Japanese editions, with more in the production and planning stages. More than a cookbook (recipes and shopping lists, with a programme to calculate quantities of ingredients to match the number of people dining, can all be printed out), the series introduces the user-cum-cook to the culture behind the cuisine. Much of the "Four Seasons of Gourmet French Cuisine" was filmed in Paris (and is selling well there) and features 101 recipes created by well-known French chefs from Thuries Magazine, one of the most respected French gourmet references. "The Art of Making Great Pastries" was also listed as one of the Top 100 CDs of 1995 by PC Magazine and "The Beauty of Japan Through the Art of Sushi" provides an in-depth look at the world of Sushi ("never tip the Sushi-chef") and includes a section on the art of Origami (paper folding) and Ikebana (flower arranging).

The appeal of interactive CD-ROMs is the almost symbiotic relationship between disc and user. A standard video can only go so far. Aside from a full CD-quality recording by the Zagreb Philharmonic Orchestra, Plastronic's "Beethoven's Fifth Multimedia Symphony" allows the user-cum-listener to learn about the masterpiece note by note, instrument by instrument, in as non-linear a fashion as the user chooses. Similarly, what makes Zapa Digital Arts' "200 Makers of the 20th Century" unique are not the newspaper clippings, newsreel footage, and audio recordings, but the interactive virtual walk-through environments where the user comes face-to-face with some of the influential men and women of this century, from Albert Einstein and Winston Churchill to Coco Chanel and Margaret Thatcher. Fully aware that the next generation of multimedia hardware will incorporate an on-line hookup, Zapa (which is also involved in developing advanced visual and audio software for media related industries) has developed a working prototype of a multi-user game over the internet, "The Witches."

Navigation is the name of the game in "The Ultimate Aviation and Space CD-ROM," a joint production of Zapa and Bitan United Multimedia (an offshoot of the Zmora, Bitan Publishing House). Travelling the 100-year history of aviation, the title contains information on 400 aircraft, missiles, spaceship and aviation pioneers. True to the principles of edutainment, users-cum-pilots can implement theoretical principles of flying an aircraft using a 3-D flight simulator. Produced in English with German, Italian, French and Spanish versions, IBM has taken on distribution to 160 countries.

That many Israeli multimedia companies are seeking (and finding) foreign distributers and marketing partners makes good business sense. Israeli firms simply do not have the leverage to elbow their products on to the very limited shelf space that is available. Finding strong marketing partners can lead to lucrative OEM (Original Equipment Manufacture) sales. Otherwise known as "bundling," companies like Superstudio sell thousands, often hundreds of thousands of their products to companies like IBM, Packard Bell, Epson, who then bundle the discs together with their own products.

But why are foreign companies turning to Israel to develop American sports titles, U.S. curriculum-based CD-ROMs and esoteric cooking lessons? Why, for example, did the International Olympics Committee grant S.E.A., a relatively small Israeli company an exclusive worldwide license to all olympic materials? And how is it that Israeli companies have produced such un-indigenous titles as an award-winning CD-ROM to teach sign language (Eduself), a programme to teach English (Edusoft), a "point-of-care" computer-borne pediatric textbook (HyperMed) and a "Kidboard" (Comfy) to make the youngest of computer users familiar with a computer keyboard. According to multimedia mogul Harry Fox, Israel "has the tools, the manpower and technical knowledge to be a world power." For an industry that is light on infrastructure and heavy on talent, Israel has what it takes, points out Rammy Weitz, president of Pixel. "Why wouldn't a foreign developer come here?" asks Superstudio's Altholz. With the highest number of personal computers per capita - CD-ROM drive should follow suite - "Israel is the best laboratory in the world," says Weitz. Others in the industry are no less chauvinistic. Israel being the melting pot that it is, many leaders in the field point to a special richness of human resources. It is not that Israel has cornered the market on creativity, but being a small country, the industry has managed to attract a talented work force from many parts of the world. This atmosphere of "cultural openness," as one producer describes it, makes for an innovative and often unique approach to product development, not to mention the easy creation of multiple language CD-ROMs.

If most of the talent is not long out of swaddling clothes, there is little child's play in this fast-track industry. Working together as a team on any one project are computer programmers, graphic artists, writers, editors, musicians and animators. There is something humanistic - renaissance-like - in this amalgamation of human effort. It still remains to be seen what effect these products will have on human intellectual development. In Israel, as in anywhere else, there are the doomsayers - death of the book, they warn - and the optimists, who see in this medium a revival of the written word.

Eno Segal of Virtual Arts refers to the new media as an evolution of information, comparing its overall impact to that of the invention of printing. According to Segal, multimedia products can only serve to stimulate a person's desire to learn, exposing a generation already hooked on mass media to areas they would otherwise never explore. "The ultimate democratizer," was how one proponent put it.

There is something defensive in their claim that interactive multimedia will not spell the end of reading as we now know it. People who love books will always want to read, they insist, and sitting in front of a computer screen is still not the same experience as reading a novel in bed. Click's Greenberg is perhaps more realistic when he says reading will become more of a novelty.

"If you can have a 3-D virtual experience of a story, why bother reading the book?" he asks. Yonathan Yaron of Enigma Informations Systems, a Tel Aviv-based technological development firm goes a step further and predicts that it is just a matter of time before downsizing will enable us to take an electronic book to bed.

Predicting consumer readiness, one of Superstudio's first projects was "Infopedia," a multi- media reference work combining the Funk and Wagnall's 29 volume encyclopaedia with seven other reference works, including Roget's Thesaurus, the Merriam-Webster Dictionary of Quotations and the Hammond World Atlas. Infopedia has 200,000 text entries illustrated by thousands of photographs, drawings and maps; about 150 video segments; 200 national anthems; and 100 animation segments. Aside from the United States, "Infopedia" has been marketed in Germany, Australia and the United Kingdom. Another Superstudio product recently released is "Multipedia," a companion CD of 18 small, specialized encyclopaedia. Eventually both reference works will be available on a single, double- density disk entitled "Jumbopedia."

The truth is that many youngsters would not dream of opening up an encyclopaedia or reference work unless it was electronic. So says Linda Harnevo, founder and CEO of Educoncept, a Tel Aviv multimedia firm which produces educational CD-ROMs for the American consumer and educational markets. Harnevo's approach is multi-disciplinary; her goal, she says, the development of all-purpose thinking strategies. One of Educoncept's early products, "Zark and the Night Team," an edutainment series for seven to nine-year-olds, integrates basic concepts, such as patterns and symbols into the many aspects of daily life. Children learn that an artist's style (Van Gogh, Sisley and Degas) is a type of pattern, as are musical notes or mathematical equations.

Turning students into active participants in the learning process is the goal behind Educoncept's "Live and Learn" series of CD-ROM titles. Geared for 12 to 16-year-olds, users navigate through photorealistic worlds and are challenged to solve real-life problems, for example, finding the cause of an unknown disease or managing stock portfolios for a variety of investors. At any time students can access text-based interactive lessons (with a self-test option) as well as a hyperlinked on-line glossary. Educoncept has received positive feedback from focus groups around the United States - they work with American consulting firms - and has found distributing partners with some of the biggest names in electronic publishing ("Zark and the Night Team" has also been translated into Hebrew and Japanese). Harnevo, however, who has degrees in applied and theoretical mathematics, acknowledges that youngsters are far more ready for this technology-based multi-disciplinary approach than are their parents or teachers. To help fill the void in Israel, Educoncept is in the process of opening up the New Media Academy, an institution of higher learning that will specialize in all aspects of a technology that is rapidly changing the face of the literate world.

Video clips, songs, cartoons, texts read aloud - Harnevo knows that multimedia can offer essentially everything. It is far more of a multi-sensory experience than reading a text or novel. The problem today is children are reading less, she says. And since that problem cannot be wished away with alluring book jackets, it is Harnevo's hope that multimedia CD-ROMs will open a window to a world of knowledge that many people might otherwise shut out. But as our technical ability to process information grows perhaps faster than our moral or intellectual ability to process it all, it remains to be seen if the final cost will ultimately be at the expense of our imagination.