RATINGS SUMMARY **** 90-100 Excellent. Highly recommended. *** 80-89 Very good. Recommended. ** 70-79 Good. Well worth considering. * 60-69 Fair. Flawed but may meet certain needs. * 1-59 Poor. To everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under Heaven. So says Pete Seeger (yes, I know it's really Ecclesiastes) and so say I. After four years, the time has come to leave CD-ROM CORNER. That decision was triggered by the continuing evolution of EContent's direction--but it was time in any case. The decision to conclude CD-ROM CORNER at the end of the year came in June 2000. In early July, I explored two large local outlets for CD-ROMs and other computer products: the Palo Alto Fry's and Sunnyvale Comp-USA, following up at other stores and at the multimedia exhibit during the ALA Annual Conference. The results tell me that the problem with title CD-ROMs (excluding games, educational software, and pure software carriers) is not that publishers haven't sent them to me. The new titles just aren't there. I saw no DVD-ROMs other than games at either store (even Encarta Reference Suite DVD was missing). If I had outlets hungry for CD-ROM reviews, I could buy a few multipacks of cultural titles from Countertop Software (four to ten CD-ROMs in boxes costing
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