Nuns on computers. It’s not a familiar image and I was surprised to find myself next to a group of them at the show along with 250,000 other people. The nuns, from the Society of St Paul, were investigating the multimedia market with a view to recording the collected works, 700,000 pages in all, of their founder, Don Alberioni. Multimedia was one of the themes of the exhibition, and with over 1,200 companies in attendance, themes and trends were as many and varied as types of pasta. Edigio Pentiraro, managing director of the Milan-based publishing company Editoria Elettronica Editel, which specialises in multimedia, is confident that the market will thrive and eventually transform education and training, together with a diversity of information systems, such as those used in business and tourism. Electronic publishing is still a rarity in Italy, though. The company was founded in 1986 prior to the CD-ROM conference in Seattle, Washington. Just four out of the 1,000 delegates were Italian. Since then, Pentiraro claims that his company, called E, has captured 50% of the Italian CD-ROM market. A major product is Aureae Latinitatis, a collection of classical texts, a joint venture between Olivetti, which supplied the development program, and the publishing house Zanichelli. Another is an English language course, in Italian at present, with Japanese and Spanish versions planned. The course offers specialisms in different vocabulary groups, such as banking. E is also distributing CDTV, West Chester, Pennsylvania-based Commodore International Ltd’s interactive multi-media system combining audio, video, graphics and text. The New Grolier Electronic Encyclopaedia runs on this system. Pentiraro predicts that E will sell 20,000 to 30,000 CDTVs by the end of the year. Pentiraro owns 31% of the company, IBM Italy has 20%, the rest is divided between publishing houses and a financial newspaper. Pentiraro had to bring in other partners as the cost of investment in Compact Disk Interactive will be substantial.
