BITS AND BYTES OF ASIAN CULTURE

ASTONISHING ASIA (INTEROPTICA PUBLISHING LIMITED, $250).

CULTURE SHOCK (INTEROPTICA PUBLISHING LIMITED, $250).

For 14 years, Earl and Nazima Kowell have criss-crossed Asia to photograph and write about its traditions and culture. Now their work is available on computer discs, with sound and pictures providing entertaining snippets of information about life in 12 countries.

NEW technology breeds new forms of information bytes, and CD ROM, once the realm of industry and institutions, is now increasingly available to consumers. In the United States, up to a third of new computers have CD drives built in.

The beauty of a CD ROM - which is your basic compact disc with 'read only memory' - is how much information can be packed on to an easily-stored medium. Early publicity boasted how a set of encyclopedia or the entire 12 volumes of the Oxford Unabridged Dictionary could be squeezed on to one disc, with its 600-megabyte storage capacity. However, these were primarily text, and for a long time combining words and pictures on a disc has been a tricky challenge, since visuals chew up a lot of disc space.

For the past 14 years the Hong Kong-based husband and wife team of Earl and Nazima Kowall have photographed and written about Asia's exotic and obscure. Together they have worked on magazine articles, books, and segments of the TV show Ripley's Believe ItOr Not. Recently, their photographs of the Silk Road were exhibited at the Hong Kong Museum of Art.

Now their work has been put into two CD-ROM discs, Astonishing Asia and Culture Shock (formerly called More Astonishing Asia), in which sound and pictures combine to provide information titbits from fertility to death rites, from customs to quirks in 12 Asian countries, including Hong Kong, China, Thailand, India, and Sri Lanka.