A vast and obvious improvement over the DataDiscman

After many months of industry speculation, Sony announced the development of its portable CD-ROM/XA player, code-named Bookman, at the CD-ROM Expo in San Francisco.

Bookman addresses many of the glaring problems of its older sibling, the ill-conceived DataDiscman (see Vol. 1, No. 8, p. 7). First, it’s based on industry-standard hardware and software — MS-DOS and a clone of the Intel 8088 chip, the NEC V-20 — and plays standard-sized 12cm read-only and audio CDs.

In addition, its 4.5-inch monochrome flat-panel display is both backlit (an absolute requirement for devices of this type) and larger than the DataDiscman’s, though based on the elderly MCGA graphics standard that displays only seven shades of gray. Nonetheless, it is able to display graphics, maps and crude digitized photographs, and has two sets of built-in fonts, in three sizes, with upper- and lower-case letters (there is a God).

YES, IT PLAYS AUDIO CDS

The player has an NTSC video-out port for display on any television, and includes a mono speaker and a stereo headphone jack. In addition to rom disks, the player also play standard audio CDs — something that the DataDiscman could not do, despite the fact that it was a product of Sony’s audio division.

The player is scheduled for release sometime in the fall, at a price to be determined. If this sounds a bit vague, it’s because Sony is treating the Bookman’s Expo unveiling only as a “technology announcement” — a step slightly above public acknowledgment, slightly below a christening.

Sony has put aside for the moment its well-documented collaborations with Apple to partner with Microsoft on this product. Microsoft’s DOS operating system is encoded in the firmware and Microsoft’s Viewer authoring tool is designed for easily creating interactive titles for the player (see Microsoft story, p. 3).

Takashi Sugiyama, the Sony manager in charge of developer relations for Bookman in the U.S., says very little revision is required to adapt existing MS-DOS CD-ROMs for the Bookman.

The most significant is that most CD-ROM titles can dump up to 10 MB of index data onto a hard disk that the Bookman obviously does not have. In addition, screen drivers must be rewritten to adjust for Bookman’s 320L200-pixel resolution. But, he says, virtually no change in data structure is required.

Given its technical capabilities, Bookman will mostly be playing the same kind of titles that were available on the DataDiscman, but they will look and work much better. The search and retrieval software provided in the Viewer authoring tool is easy for the developer, yet extremely sophisticated for the user.

Though billed as a “multimedia” as well as a “personal information” device, Sugiyama acknowledges that Bookman’s multimedia capabilities will always play a supporting role to the textual information in Bookman titles.

Links between portions of text, or between text and graphics, can be created by the developer, who is not locked into a poor retrieval engine seared into the ROMs. Sony is also collaborating with Mammoth Micro Productions on a version of its Mammoth Tool System and runtime player, which will allow developers to create and play back interleaved data, like synchronized audio and data.

DESIGNED FOR THE U.S. MARKET

In fairness to Sony, the DataDiscman was never designed for the American market; it was an error in judgment that brought it to the U.S. shores in the first place. But everyone’s entitled to a mistake or two, especially a company that is willing to take risks the way Sony is.

The Bookman, on the other hand, was developed especially for American markets, with PC compatibility high on the priority list. Development will not stop here. Although Sony officials would not go on record as saying so, the Bookman (or whatever they decide to call it — “Bookman” is actually a great name) will ultimately sport a color display as well as color output, making it a portable competitor to CD-I-like devices, but one that runs the same system software as tens of millions of office and home computers.

David Baron, Denise Caruso