Weighing in at over 14 pounds and priced at $448, this 989-page monster is the largest and most expensive book that I have ever encountered in 50 years of reviewing computing literature! It is aimed extremely broadly at “anyone concerned with multimedia systems and their applications.” It claims to cover everything about the subject. It was written by 145 contributors and an editorial board of 45, all experts in their specialties. Despite this enormous effort, this huge work is not a good book. Let me explain why.

Useful and dependable encyclopedias must have three characteristics. They must be easy to use, comprehensive, and accurate. In this case, the reputations of the contributors certainly guarantee accuracy, but the book is hard to use, badly organized, and does not include all of the important parts of the vast and varied field of multimedia. The table of contents (TOC) lists the contributions alphabetically by the first word in each title. Other than this, the contents are not grouped in any way.

An encyclopedia user who encounters such a TOC and the alphabetic arrangement of the text will turn to the index, which, in this case, is short, limited, and very little more than a repetition of the TOC with a few added terms. In this day of easily available index-creating programs, a useless index such as this is inexcusable.

First I checked to see if multimedia applications were covered. Of the four areas that are commonly considered to exemplify multimedia applications--online news, distance education, interactive gaming, and video-on-demand--only the last gets any substantial coverage, while education is totally overlooked. Then I checked for the major features of multimedia other than applications. I found that workstation technology, communication protocols and bandwidth, internetworking, data storage, and information retrieval are either missing, treated superficially, or buried out of sight under other names. Although many of the rest of the 250 articles touch on the foundations, technologies, and emerging elements of this field, the simplistic organization of the book makes the subjects difficult to find.

This is not an encyclopedia, but is, instead, a poorly edited collection of many wordy and often badly written technical papers. The definitions that start many papers are poorly thought out and often incorrect. The illustrative photographs are so badly reproduced that they are almost useless. Although multimedia is currently an extremely popular field and could well use a good encyclopedia, this is not it.