LEADING publishers Hachette and La Russ are about to publish floppy disk books, while three publishers in the United States are about to hit retail chains with their floppy titles.
The software which these publishers use to produce floppy or compact disc-read-only memory (CD-ROM) books for use on Macintoshes is ideal for companies with corporate training, administrative journal, newsletter or other publishing needs.
The software, Expanded Book Toolkit, comes from ''new media'' publisher Voyager and is available through Hongkong-based Asia-CD.
It takes only a few hours to master but creates discreet pages of text which can be turned, dog-eared, clipped or even scribbled on in the convenient margin space.
The software can make a published electronic author out of any disheartened writer whose original manuscripts have been rejected by publishing houses. Voyager is working on an IBM PC version of the Toolkit which can incorporate sound, videos compressed by Apple's QuickTime, videodiscs, audio CD, and graphics to create interactive books.
But the IBM PC version of the software, inspired by the book-like size and weight of the Macintosh Powerbook, is about one year away.
An International Toolkit, out this month, has just been localised into nine European languages: English, French, German, Italian, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Finnish and Spanish. Savings on corporate training, administrative and procedure books will beespecially worthwhile for company publishers, but the product's primary target is publishers who will use it to develop new titles or transfer old ones on to the new media.
