January/February 1995
Utne Reader
Bob Stein is the Friedrich Engels of interactive media -- a
capitalist entrepreneur with leftist convictions and a hot company
on his hands. The Manhattan-based Voyager Company creates CD-ROMs
and floppy disks that turn serious books by the likes of Stephen
Jay Gould and Art Spiegelman into sound-and-sight adventures and
make most of the rest of the glitz-and-game-driven interactive
media world look cheap by comparison. Living on the border between
print and megabytes, Stein holds out for thoughtfulness, humanity,
and cultural significance in multimedia.
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Calling a successful entrepreneur in a high-technology industry
a 'revolutionary' may be a rhetorical tic of business journalists,
but the word is spot-on for Bob Stein. He's both the former
publisher of the Revolutionary Communist Party USA's weekly paper,
Revolutionary Worker, and the cofounder, in 1984, of The
Voyager Company, a healthy Manhattan-based capitalist enterprise
that began the consumer CD-ROM revolution. Voyager publishes
high-quality, thoughtful multimedia CD-ROMs--discs that unspool
texts on computer screens and offer supplementary goodies (moving
and still pictures, recorded sound, sublayers of text) at the touch
of a key or the click of a mouse.
Switching his struggle from the streets to the digital frontier
seems to have come easily to Stein, 49, for whom the effort to help
create what he calls 'a diverse and exciting electronic culture'
means empowering writers and readers in new ways.
After giving up political work in 1980, Stein took a job with
Encyclopaedia Britannica, crisscrossing the country researching the
impact of the new digital technology on teaching and learning. That
led to a consulting stint at Atari and the conviction that even
though entertainment-industry types were hot to dominate the
emerging multimedia world, there could be room for 'a company with
a strong recognition of the role of the author, producing texts
with a clear and serious point of view. Stuff with an edge,' as
Stein sums it up.