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RR 2010/04 Encyclopedia of Multimedia: A-Z (2nd ed.) Edited by Borko Furht Springer Heidelberg 2008 xxx + 1,001 pp. ISBN 978 0 387 74724 8 £359/$449 Also available as an e-book (ISBN 978 0 387 7841 4)
Keywords Encyclopedias, Multimedia
Review DOI 10.1108/09504121011011761
Not so long ago multimedia seemed like a brand new research field and an emerging new industry but, today, it can truly be said to have come of age. The Encyclopedia of Multimedia, second edition, has, as its aim, an in-depth coverage of the important concepts, issues, and technology trends in the field of multimedia technologies, systems, techniques, and applications.
The work is slightly over 1,000 pages in length and is well illustrated with 565 figures and 51 tables. There is no major Introduction, merely a fairly brief Preface from Editor-in-Chief, Borko Furht, which is more in the nature of acknowledgements and thanks to the Editorial Board and publishers. The Encyclopedia is simply an A to Z list of entries and a substantial index.
This is definitely not a work for the beginner in multimedia, and this can be appreciated from the first entry under the letter A on Active Buffer Management for Provision of VCR Functionalities which covers adjusting the contents of the buffer after execution of VCR functions in VoD Systems. This entry, which includes several illustrations, is of a highly technical nature. For example, the first figure shows the basic operational principle of ABM in a staggered VoD system with no...