CompuServe Messages

I agree that the most obvious (and perhaps most successful) applications will be educational first. I would guess encyclopedias foremost, followed by, as you say, museum tours, etc. Unfortunately, as you get away from the broad-based appeal of an encyclopedia, and into more interesting, specific research areas, the size of the market will be small. That is, let's say I'm a civil war buff, and I'd love to have oodles of civil war info (much more detailed than an encyclopedia would have) on CD-ROM. Would I also be likely to own such a device? Are there enough of me in the world for someone to go to the work and expense to produce such a narrow-topic disk? Certainly, applications like that would work wonderfully on that medium, what with text, pictures, diagrams of battle movements, video of reenactments, etc. And so would be a myriad of topics like this. But where's the volume to justify it? This may be an unbreakable impasse unless 1) carefully picked applications can be found that would have a broad enough appeal and/or 2) there is some way for an organization that already has such info in some other format to easily (and cheaply) convert it, so that they don't have to sell as many units to justify the trouble.