Blue Book (CD standard) Blue Book (CD standard) The Blue Book is a compact disc standard developed in 1995 by Philips and Sony. It defines the Enhanced Music CD format (E-CD, also known as CD-Extra, CD-Plus and CD+), which combines audio tracks and data tracks on the same disc. The format was created as a way to solve the problem of mixed mode CDs, which were not properly supported by many CD players. The standard is not freely available and must be licensed from Philips. E-CDs are created through the "stamped multisession" technology, which creates two sessions on a disc. The first session of
Philips CD-i The CD-i was abandoned by 1996 and was a commercial failure, estimated to have lost Philips as much as one US billion dollars in the American market. Philips at first marketed CD-i as a family entertainment product, and avoided mentioning video games to not compete against game consoles. Early software releases focused heavily on educational, music, and self-improvement titles, with only a few games, many of them adaptations of board games such as "Connect Four". However, the system was handily beaten in the market for multimedia devices by cheap low-end PCs, and the games were the best-selling software. By 1993