Checking Out Past Painlessly : Technology: Garden Grove company has put 970 classic works on compact disc. The conversion process has kept such electronic libraries limited.

A few years ago, Robert Hustwit had the unpleasant task of scanning eight volumes of arcane text by 18th-Century German philosopher Immanuel Kant in search of a single quotation for a philosophy-research project.

The search took days. And when he was finished, the bleary-eyed Hustwit mused to himself that there ought to be a faster way.

“I figured if somebody could get the credit history for my whole life in 30 seconds, I ought to be able find something quickly on somebody famous who has been dead for more than 100 years,” Hustwit recalled.

He discovered a solution in the fledgling world of electronic publishing, and now he is making a living from it.

Hustwit and his brother, William, started a company called World Library Inc. in Garden Grove that publishes computerized text of 970 classic works of literature and philosophy on a compact disc. A second edition was recently released.

The company has sold 25,000 copies of its Library of the Future on CD-ROM (compact discs containing text and graphics). The $495, first-edition product has been popular with book lovers, who can use specially equipped personal computers to instantly search “Moby Dick” or “War and Peace” for favorite passages.

“It’s great for the lazy intellectual. . . ,” said Milton Eder, a New York technology consultant and writer who uses Library of the Future. “In research, there is no bigger pain than going to the library and finding a book is missing.”

Eder uses Library of the Future to search for word origins in literary classics. He simply types in the word he wants to find, and the computer displays its occurrence in each of the works within a minute. The World Library program can search through the works by title, author, exact quotations, and even historical epochs and genres.

CD-ROMs are the computer version of their better-known sister technology, the compact audio discs that have taken the music-recording industry by storm. Instead of sound, CD-ROMs store text and graphics--the equivalent of hundreds of floppy disks--on a single 5.25-inch disc. In a CD-ROM drive, a laser beam scans a spinning disc, which is imprinted with thousands of tiny bumps that are coded to represent bits of data, which can then be interpreted by a computer as text or graphics.

Unlike floppy disks, however, data stored on a CD-ROM disc cannot be erased and re-recorded. At a minimum, a user needs an IBM-compatible personal computer with graphics capability and a CD-ROM drive to use World Library’s product.

Introduced in 1985, CD-ROM drives have fallen in price from more than $1,000 to less than $400. Worldwide demand for the drives is expected to reach 360,000 in 1991, up from 240,000 last year, according to Dataquest Inc., a San Jose market-research company.

Researchers and government agencies have bought most of the CD-ROM drives, but the discs are becoming more popular for education and entertainment, according to Robert Gaskin, a Dataquest analyst. World Library hopes to draw both casual readers and scholarly researchers into the market.

Although previous market forecasts have been overly optimistic, Gaskin predicts demand for CD-ROM drives to reach 3.2 million by 1995 as new applications emerge.

The burgeoning market has piqued the interest of some major corporations such as Microsoft Corp., Sony Corp. and Time Warner Publishing. But World Libary has no direct competitors so far in the business of putting a library of literature onto compact discs.

World Library’s first-edition disc, which hit the market in June, 1990, contained 450 works of literature. The second edition was issued this month. Priced at $695, it includes twice as many works and more than a hundred illustrations.

It is fitting that World Library was founded by a man who loves books. Robert Hustwit, 48, is a bearded, bespectacled man with a jolly laugh, who boasts proudly that he has read more than 4,200 books in his collection of 7,000. He never graduated from college, and he believes that Library of the Future is a tool for self-education.

As president of the family-owned company, Robert Hustwit selects the books--from Sherlock Holmes adventures to Plato’s “Republic”--to be offered on compact disc.

“Because the memory capacity of the discs grows as we learn how to compress data, we keep adding books to each edition,” he said. “We’re taking a global view, and I’m trying desperately to find English editions of literature from societies around the world. I like to think of myself as an archivist.”

Robert Hustwit generally selects older books in the public domain to avoid having to pay for copyrights. Once converted to electronic form, World Library can copyright the disc and license it to other companies.

The conversion process helps to explain why there are few products like Library of the Future. It is easy to scan books into a computer, but accuracy is limited. Robert Hustwit wrote the elaborate, proofreading software program that corrects many of the mistakes made in the scanning process.

The software eliminates 80% of the proofreading work, Robert Hustwit said. After the works are transferred to a magnetic disc, the company sends a master copy to a Sony Corp. compact disc plant in Indiana, where it is pressed onto compact discs.

William Hustwit, 52, is the company’s chief executive, handling marketing and sales of the discs, which are distributed by catalogue. To bring in more revenue, the company also publishes a disc that contains records of U.S. Customs agency rulings, he said.

The Hustwits hope to participate in the emerging “multimedia” market, in which computers are used to combine sound, video and text into a single presentation. One multimedia product available now is a Talking Library of the Future that, using a computer synthesizer, reads text aloud for blind persons.

The company is putting together three discs of 150 works each for Sony’s new DataDiscman, a portable “electronic book” that displays text from 3.5-inch compact discs. The first disc will be available in November.

World Library has also licensed rights to its electronic works to AND Communications, a Los Angeles company that is developing CD-ROM products for International Business Machines Corp.’s new line of multimedia products.

The company also publishes a shorter version with 25 works on a floppy disk, and it is preparing versions for Apple Computer’s Macintosh machines and for Microsoft’s popular Windows software program. Eventually, William Hustwit estimates, the company will be able to cram 3,000 to 4,000 titles on a single compact disc.

As with any new business, the competition is growing. A few competitors, such as CMC Research Inc., have published the works of Shakespeare in compact-disc format.