Richard A. Bowers is president of Information Arts, a design and 
technology consulting firm for the optical publishing industry.  Bowers also 
serves as Executive Director of the Optical Publishing Association, the 
international CDROM trade association, of which he was a co-founder.  He is 
former Director of Development for the Applied Information Technologies 
Research Center 

(AITRC), a non-profit R&D consortium of electronic publishers in Columbus 
Ohio.  He is author of the upcoming book Spinning Light into Gold_, a 
publishers' guide for CDROM and electronic publishing media.  He is the 
founder and Editor of the Optical Publishing Directory , the first in-print 
guide to CD-ROM titles, and has written and spoken extensively in the US 
and Europe on optical publishing issues, natural language technology, SGML 
and other production technologies, hypertext and related topics.  Bowers 
has nearly 20 years of experience in a wide range of business activities, 
including MIS and trade publishing.