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Five years ago, increasing visibility was among the greatest worries for consumer CD-ROM publishers in a then-fairly unknown market. Today, in a saturated marketplace, CD-ROM publishers' concerns have changed. With over 12,000 titles already available for sale and another several thousand due to be introduced during 1997, CD-ROM publishers face lack of shelf space, more competition, and less than spectacular market expansion.
And for those publishers who really enjoy anxiety, there is also the tremendous growth of the Internet to consider. Many publishers don't claim to understand the Internet, its culture, or its offerings, but they know they need to have a "presence" on the Web, and they think that part of that presence should be directly tied to their CD-ROM products.
Publishers are altering their CD-ROM strategies to take advantage of the Internet, seeing that CD-ROM no longer needs to be thought of exclusively as a standalone product. Whether to increase CD-ROM sales and create new types of relationships with their customers or to extend the content of the titles outward, solving CD-ROM's limits of space, interactivity, and timeliness, CD-ROM publishers are increasingly pursuing the Internet as part of their publishing program. Though a visit to any computer retailer, bookstore, or direct marketing catalog yields only a smattering of hybrid titles today-InfoTech, a market research house based in Woodstock, Vermont, has counted some 350 or more by mid-1996 alone-the projections in the growth of CD/online hybrid titles can be quite spectacular. In fact, InfoTech, which has covered the industry for most of a decade, projects that there will be 3,500 hybrid titles by the end of 1997; other research houses seem less sanguineCowles/SIMBA estimates 640 CD/online hybrid titles for 1997-but the trend is clear. Fortunately, there are a variety of newer CD-ROM/Internet strategies to help both mark and navigate this path.
The emergence of a sense of urgency only highlights the basic questions: Why are so many publishers focused on creating hybrid titles? What strategies are the hybrid publishers trying to implement? And what are some examples of their implementation strategies?
CD/ONLINE HYBRIDS: WHY THE RUSH?
Ironically, in these days of heightened responsiveness to customer requests by manufacturers, current customer demands have had little to do with publishers' motivations to add Internet components to...