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JB: What about profit?

ROWAN: We do CD-ROMs to make money. A Passion for Art has already become a profitable title for us. 1996, the sales of this year, has become much tougher for all of our products. But we're in these businesses to make money, and I believe that on an international basis we will be better than break even on each of our products.

JB: What kinds of distribution channels are you selling into?

ROWAN: We're doing a lot of different things. For example, with the Leonardo da Vinci title, it's on sale at the museum shops and through a variety of catalogues. We also have an active effort to sell it on a direct basis. The recent Time Magazine article that talked about both the FDR product and the Leonardo product, gave people a way to access Corbis directly, and that's has helped tremendously. We're in bookstores; probably the best channel for us to date in that regard has been Borders-that has been very successful. I just wish they had ten thousand stores, instead of the numbers they have. They've been a wonderful distributor for us. We also are quite active with the computer software channel, although that is the channel that has become most cluttered with a large number of products and increasingly is being dominated by games. Some reference and some kids titles, as I mentioned. Internationally the distribution channels are slightly different. The Europeans are not nearly so voracious for games, so when you walk into a computer software store in Paris, or in Germany, you'll see a higher percentage of the titles being sold are cultural titles, which is a good thing for the manufacturers like Corbis both that are US based and those in Europe.

JB: What about competition from the Web and the inherent limitation of the CD medium.

ROWAN: It's interesting-we think of our titles from the standpoint of the number of hours of playability that are in them. And they range anywhere from a conservative 8 hours to as many as 20 hours or more. I believe if you're very careful, and we have been, you can give the same pick-up-from-where-I-left-off ability with the CD-ROM almost that you can with a magazine. Admittedly, you have to have your computer running and you have to start it up, but it's quite possible to do that-I personally have done that quite a bit with one of our titles that is a favorite of mine which is called Critical Mass-it's on the making of the atomic bomb and the people who were at Los Alamos. I spent some time exploring Richard Feynman through the title, and I looked at letters that he wrote to his wife when she was dying of cancer, approaching the Trinity test, and various documents, and the travail that he went through when he was popular and unpopular and then popular again. After I finished Feynman I went back and picked up reading the article on Oppenheimer, I did the same thing with him.

The accessibility is there, if you're very careful about it. In fact let me make another comment: I've read surveys that indicate that consumers are much more satisfied with the experience of using a CD-ROM than they are, today anyway, satisfied with the experience of using the World Wide Web. I spend quite a bit of time in both. The problems of available bandwidth and of the ability of the sites that I'm visiting on the Web to have a variation in demand, gives a sort of an intermittency that is quite frustrating. I can turn the page of a magazine when I want to-I can actually turn the page in the CD-ROM metaphor equally. I can do that on the Web, but I don't know how long I'm going to have to wait for it to happen. Sometimes it's very quickly; sometimes it's slowly. The Web has great promise, and Corbis is making a very large investment in it, for the future, but it hasn't quite come together to provide the same either learning or information or entertainment experience that one can get from the CD-ROM.

JB: What about "fat pipes." Is bandwidth a huge issue for you?

ROWAN: It's absolutely a huge issue. But let me address something. We spend roughly a half million dollars, total cost, producing a CD-ROM title. And that CD-ROM title may have 20 plus hours of playability on it. So we're creating what we think and what the reviewers tell us, is a very compelling CD-ROM experience-a very compelling entertainment and education experience for around half a million dollars, for ten to 15 to 20 hours of result. We have several people who are interested in repurposing that material, either for television or for other types of online features that are lower in interactivity; that are more semigraphic and more linear, and that's something that we think we will do, and we think has the potential of providing a better return for the types of investments we're making in producing the product.

Last year at Intermedia I was asked to participate in Stewart McBride's three-minute thing. What I was asked to do was to show three minutes of Critical Mass. I thought I was doing well to get it down to ten minutes at TED, but to get it to three minutes! But I had it totally rehearsed, and I timed out what I could do in three minutes-and I ran exactly 180 seconds, three minutes. I watched other people who were showing things they were doing on the Web, and they were dead, because they had no control over the time, and time was really their enemy. That is part of the consumer experience; that what the Web has to be is as reliable in a sense as a CD-ROM. And when it is, it may replace it.

JB: Problem: I like to do my serious thinking lying down. Unfortunately, my powerbook has no CD-ROM drive.

ROWAN: That's a very interesting observation. Bob Stein gave me an idea to try, was reading Jurassic Park while lying in bed with the powerbook on my chest. And with my wife laughing in the background I went at that seriously. I tried it for about 5 minutes, and I said wait a minute, this-you know, the weight, the heat, the whole thing-that wasn't what it was all about. But I do think that it is possible to invent a home based product which has all the convenience of a television with the ability to have it interactive and the advantages which the computer can bring, and that certainly what a number of companies are trying to do.


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