1ST BIG SHOPPING CATALOG ON CD-ROM GETS MIXED REVIEW.

Byline: Mike Langberg Knight-Ridder Newspapers

Catalog shopping on CD-ROM is one of those great ideas that should be easy to accomplish - like tax reform or nutritious fast food - but which never seem to make the leap from talk to reality.

Most of the CD-ROM shopping catalogs I've run across suffer from two failings: They present a small number of items from a group of merchants rather than a complete selection from an individual retailer, and they rarely offer significant information beyond their print counterparts.

Spiegel Inc., one of the retailers most eager to explore electronic shopping, has taken a big step in resolving my first complaint.

The new Spiegel Catalog on CD-ROM contains all of the company's 834-page ``Big Book'' for Spring. It carries photographs and descriptions of 3,000 items, mostly home furnishings and women's apparel. It's the first time a major mail-order retailer has put an entire large catalog on CD-ROM.

But the Spiegel CD-ROM doesn't address my second gripe. The disk merely reproduces the print catalog, with a few extra snippets of audio narration and photographic montage sequences, instead of taking advantage of the CD-ROM's huge storage capacity to offer more pictures or text.

Still, regular Spiegel shoppers will enjoy flipping through the electronic catalog on a home computer equipped with CD-ROM. And the price is right: You pay $13 but get a $13 credit on any Spiegel order.

The CD-ROM catalog, released in mid-April, is available in a few bookstores that also sell the print version, released in January. But the best way to find the CD-ROM is by calling Spiegel directly at [phone].

What you get on screen is almost identical to the print catalog, with two main sections subdivided into chapters called ``shops.''

``Fashion'' offers 13 shops, such as ``Boutique Europa'' and ``Fine Jewelry,'' while ``Home'' provides 12 shops, such as ``The Bath'' and ``Time Pieces.''

Clicking an arrow at the bottom of the screen takes you, page by page, through the merchandise. By clicking a picture on the screen, you summon an enlarged view and a text block with the item's description. A few items have an additional button to play a short audio clip. An example of the audio is this breathless comment on a $39 crochet flowered sweater and $39 embroidered floral skirt: ``Special details like embroidery and lace enter the picture but take on a new personality. It's fresh, yet bold. Soft, yet daring. It's truly unique.''

A forgivable bit of retailing hype, perhaps, but it doesn't give much incentive to boot up a personal computer and stick in a CD-ROM instead of just thumbing through the pages of a print catalog.

The CD-ROM is also hurt by poor photographic reproduction. The program only works with the monitor set to 256 colors, not the thousands-of-colors setting that provides more accurate rendering. As a result, the photographs on screen look washed out and grainy - a potential kiss of death for catalog merchants who rely on enticing pictures to move merchandise.

The are only two features on the CD-ROM not found in the print catalog. A ``personal shopper'' presents a scrolling slide show of items in categories such as ``guy gifts'' and ``romance'' for those who need help deciding what to buy. And there is an electronic form to keep track of the items you want, which can be ordered by printout or sent to Spiegel by modem.

Spiegel, which also owns the Eddie Bauer chain of outdoor clothing stores, has experimented widely with new media. It has tried everything from interactive television test projects to a new site on the World Wide Web at http://www.spiegel.com with some interesting magazine-type features.

Spiegel knows that many of these early efforts will fail, but is willing to learn from mistakes and try again. That's probably why Spiegel hasn't committed itself to issuing a CD-ROM version of the Autumn Big Book, which should reach about 5 million conventional mailboxes in July.

I hope Spiegel tries again with a CD-ROM, and makes two changes. First, the picture quality absolutely must be improved. Second, Spiegel needs to hire more copywriters and photographers to generate extra material for the CD-ROM. Why not show a front, back and side view for every piece of apparel, in every possible color? And why not reproduce the complete instruction manual for consumer-electronics items such as camcorders and telephone answering machines? That kind of in-depth treatment, while costly to produce, would motivate me to get off the sofa, where I usually recline while reading print catalogs, and sit in front of my computer.