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ROWAN: I grew up in the Northeast-my undergraduate education was in electrical engineering and I received an MBA both at Cornell. I worked for 22 years at IBM in a variety of marketing positions. I left IBM 12 years ago and since that time have worked in several companies who were doing imaging on the desktop. The first of these was a work station manufacturer, and we were doing some very interesting applications on Unix workstations around imaging on the desktop. I worked at Ampex, I was president of a company in Berkeley called AXS that was really doing a set of applications that were not dissimilar to those we have underway at Corbis, and it was really that 12 years and that journey that gave me an obsession with the technology of digital content, and the way that digital content is going to change communication. I was fortunate enough to be a candidate for, and be selected for this position at Corbis. I was an engineer who got drawn into sales and marketing, and I've been returning to technology every since.

JB: Are you pursuing newly created images or are you going to mostly an archive?

ROWAN: Corbis has a very strong commitment to the rights of artists, and overall the archive is about 5% about fine art, be it older material or more recent material. The paintings of artists that lived after 1950 is protected in various ways in different countries, but there's a strong degree of protection by the artists and the artists' estates over that material. So we have done some work with artists who lived after 1950, but it is somewhat more difficult and-or I should say there are other considerations that need to be worked with. We do have some material from a number of people who have lived in that period. In fact, in A Passion for Art, the work of Picasso, and of a number of other contemporary French artists, are included on the CD, and we worked with those estates to gain the permission to include their images on the CD.

JB: What percentage of business is devoted to CD-ROM storytelling?

ROWAN: There are really two business parts of Corbis today-one is the licensing of pictures for use in print and electronic publishing products, and that represents probably 70% of our revenue today; the other 30% comes from the CD-ROM side and these six titles now that we have in the marketplace.

The Leonardo title, which we thought long and hard about whether it would be successful, is off to a very fast start-aided by the exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. That exhibition is now in Paris and will go to the Seattle Art Museum in the fall of '97. It is apparent, both in the U.S. and in Europe that there is a tremendous amount of interest in Leonardo, and I think we've explored the subject in a way never done before.

I'd love to give you an example of what can be done and we did with the Leonardo material that simply wasn't possible before. Leonardo wrote a series of documents throughout his life, and they're known as notebooks or Codices. The Codex Leicester, which is one of those notebooks, was exhibited in New York and, like his others, is written backwards, by Leonardo, in ancient Italian. The most commonly held theory is that he wrote backwards because he was left-handed, and was constrained by the writing materials available to him in the early 1500's. He wrote The Codex Leicester between 1505 and 1509.

What we've done on the CD is put the entire codex there, so there are some 72 pages with all the wonderful diagrams, some of them very well known, and we allow you to mirror, and then to lay across on the screen something that we call a Codescope, which translates the codex into either English, French or Italian and soon into German. Keeping all the diagrams intact, you can move the codescope over the manuscript and see it in the language that makes sense to you, at the same time preserving the wonderful texture and sweep of hand of his actual writing that went into this manuscript. The Codescope could not have been accomplished until the advent of current computer technology.. You could translate the codex, but could never be able to see together the combination of the original with something you can really read.

JB: So why isn't it now known as the Gates Codex?

ROWAN: The codex had been known for hundreds of years as the Codex Leicester. When Armand Hammer purchased it, he changed its name to the Codex Hammer. When it was purchased in December of 1994 by Bill Gates, he changed the name of the document back to the name by which it was most well-known, the Codex Leicester, after the Earl of Leicester.

There is no other codex named after an individual, and this is the only codex of da Vinci that is in private hands. So it is kind of special.

Since Bill bought it it's been on tour. It was exhibited first in Venice, then in Milan, then in Rome. It came back and rested for a little back at Christies, and then went into the exhibition in New York. So it has not been at Bill's house, yet,-it will come there after it leaves France, for a short time, before again parts-and all of it-go out on exhibition again. Bill's intention is to preserve it, have some of his own access to it, but predominantly utilize it to give other people access. One of the nice things about the exhibition in NY is that you can see the codex itself, and then you can move to a computer station that's adjacent and you can read the same words in English, going in the right direction, that you haven't been able to see on the actual codex.

JB: Can we talk about CD-ROM business for a bit? It seems to be in a sorry state. At the Milia conference in Cannes, you see the same small companies exhibiting the same CD's year after year whereas at the Frankfurt Book Fair, agents and publishers are always showing new proposals and books. In America, it seems very hard for a company to survive by publishing CD-ROMs on intelligent subjects.

ROWAN: Corbis has created CD-ROM products to celebrate the Corbis library. We really have only done titles where the pictures that provide the predominant use for the title come from the library. We had the paintings from the Barnes Collection in the library before we ever decided even to undertake the project on that.

The CD-ROM business is interesting. The market for what I would call higher-brow, or cultural, CD-ROM products, is a very weak one at the moment in the United States. The CD-ROM market in the US is currently being dominated by games, by reference titles, and on a selective basis by children's titles, and those three categories are occupying the bulk of the retail distribution space. That has made life difficult for the distributors of titles such as those Corbis produces, and that will cause a bit of a shakeout within the industry. If you consider what a consumer faces walking into a store looking at CD-ROM titles-they have to make a judgment based on a box. They really are not given an opportunity to try the product. They can't, as you can with a book, open it a read a few pages. And so in a way the industry, both the manufacturers like Corbis and the distributors, have really failed to understand what the consumer's need is. So as thousands of products became available, competing for a tenth or less that number of slots of shelf space, the consumer was often burned.

I watched one time a woman in Paris looking at one of our products in French in one hand, and another product in her other hand, and she was clearly trying to decide which to buy. I knew both products very well, she needed to make the decision from the box, and I resisted the temptation to be yet one more ugly American walk up and tell her which one she should buy. I never stayed to find out which one she bought. But I know that's a terrible dilemma for the consumer. What I hope will happen is that through online supplement to future titles, and through a better job being done by the distribution side, with manufacturer's help, that the consumer can have a taste before they buy, and therefore make better choices.

The people that have purchased our product love them. We've actually just recently done a mailing to the people that have registered our products, and they're snapping up additional ones like crazy, so they like the experience, they like the products. But it's hard for the consumer to decide what to buy in this sea of choices. On the other hand, in Europe, the CD-ROM business for cultural titles is much stronger. France is a market with a much smaller installed base than the US. Yet we may sell more copies there of a single product, such as Leonardo.