The soft-spoken man is Peter Kindersley, 53, chairman of Dorling Kindersley, Ltd. Beginning as a humble book packager in the early 1970s, he now runs one of the world’s most far-seeing publishing companies, one that is taking books into the digital ag e. A decade ago-long before most publishers, who are only now catching up-he saw the future coming and converted to computers for the production and composition of his books.
Now, with a new corporate collaborator, he’s expanding into a new field. Kindersley has formed an alliance with Microsoft, the Washington-based software giant, to design and produce CD-ROMs based on Dorling Kindersley books, most of which are elaborate, highly visual reference works, such as “The Complete Horse Book.” Moving into multimedia was “an absolutely natural thing,” he says, in part because of the signature format of the books: cutout color pictures against white, with blocks of text floating around the images. This translated easily into DK’s first CD-ROM, “Microsoft Musical Instruments,” released last fall. Want to hear an instrument from the Middle East? Click on that part of a map of the world and listen to a zummara. In its first three months on the market Microsoft sold as many copies of the disc as it had expected to sell in its first year. DK’s next CD-ROM may be a version of David Macaulay’s best-selling “The Way Things Work,” another natural for the format, with its bits of information that can be expanded and linked.
Publishing’s move into digital formats may not turn out to be the Gutenbergstyle revolution that many are claiming it to be. But what’s already certain is that the upheaval is comparable in scale to that of the late ’70s, when conglomerates gobbled up independent houses and chain stores remade bookselling. New York literary agent Richard Curtis says he’d be surprised if in 10 or 15 years “the paper end of publishing represents more than 50 percent of the business.”
The future can be sampled now. At least 20 companies publish books on floppy discs, and an on-line electronic bookstore, based in Brookline, Mass., can deliver titles by modem. In Bloomingdale, Ill., Tower Records plans to open a new store this fall where all its media products-from software to music CDs to books-will be sold together under one roof.
What does digital portend for the intellectual life? One effect may be a de-emphasis on the stature of the writer. UCLA music scholar Robert Winter, who has worked on four music-appreciation CD-ROMs, expects that “the notion of writing as a source of cultural authority will vanish.” The novelist Robert Coover, who teaches a hypertext fiction workshop at Brown, is convinced that “the iconization of the author, the making of him into a mythic figure, is over. That’s a characteristic of our past and it’s not going to be the case in the future.”
Kindersley comer, to the digital world with the head of a mogul and the eyes of a craftsman. The son of a designersculptor father, he was educated in a workshop where if he wanted to make pots, “we had to dig the clay, we had to refine it and we had to build the kiln.” He has evolved an artisanal, teamoriented organization that’s a digital variation on the workshops of his youth. He’s not looking back. “The problem,” he says, “is that we believe in such a thing as hallowed ground.” Byte by byte, it’s shifting beneath our feet.
