Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. The story of the compact disc is also the story of the end of physical media. It is the story of how the quest for perfection laid the grounds for the death of a great industry. For in the passage from analogue media, like records and tapes, to digital formats, like CDs, something changed in the nature of media and in the relationship we have with music. Music became code, a sequence of 1s and 0s, a flow of pure information. The material structure of the medium itself was always supposed to disappear. But the physical has proved to possess an uncanny knack for returning. Today the CD is a zombie medium, still popular amongst certain avant-garde record labels and Japanese consumers. Against all the odds, the spectre endures. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

This revised edition of Ken Pohlmann's classic survey of the compact disc world celebrates the 10th birthday of the most successful consumer electronics product ever produced. New material updates the user on the latest technological advances and gives insight into new formats and applications.

A popularly written guide to the history, technology, and future of the compact disc.

In March 1979, a prototype of a ‘Compact Disc (CD) digital audio system’ was publicly presented and demonstrated to an audience of about 300 journalists at Philips in Eindhoven, The Netherlands. This milestone effectively marked the beginning of the digital entertainment era. In the years to follow, the CD-audio system became an astonishing worldwide success, and was followed by successful derivatives such as CD-ROM, CD-RW, DVD, and recently Blu-ray Disc. Today, around the thirtieth anniversary of the milestone, it is taken for granted that media content is stored and distributed digitally, and the analog era seems long gone. This book retraces the origins of the CD system and the subsequent evolution of digital optical storage, with a focus on the contributions of Philips to this field. The book contains perspectives on the history and evolution of optical storage, along with reproductions of key technical contributions of Philips to the field.