Dis-Enhanced

We have been deeply enjoying the audio books of the Chronicles of Narnia, which are even cheaper on iTunes, not that we bought them there. They're lovely recordings, unabridged, and we're all hypnotized.

So when I noticed that they came with enhanced computer content, I thought, hey, that could be fun, and shoved the disk for The Horse and His Boy into my computer. The first sign that something was not as it should be came when I clicked on README MAC.txt and found this:

If the Autorun Feature is not enabled on your Computer,
and the CD does not automatically start;
Double click on the DILBERT.exe file

located on your THE HORSE AND HIS BOY CD.

The page is best viewed in Internet Explorer 5.X, Netscape 6.X, or higher.

Now I'm not going to quibble about capitalization or punctuation, because there are more fundamental issues here. As you might have guessed, the file for The Horse and His Boy is not named DILBERT, and the executable for the Macintosh doesn't have the .exe extension, either. The right answer would be the file named "Horse".

And when you open said file? Why, the quality just keeps coming! You get a free-standing Flash animation which zooms in on "The Chronicals of Narnia". That is not MY typo. That is their typo. And what does it do? It has three links, none of which work on my machine, because they don't like my default web browser. One of them is to www.narnia.com which turns out to be Disney advertising for the more recent movie.

I would email my complaint to The Cutting Corporation, which produced this piece of remarkable lameness except, lame to the end, they provide a snail-mail address, and a phone and fax number. (They're not 800 numbers either.) Looking on the web, their main business is audio archival and transfer. Next time perhaps Harper Audio could hire a software firm to do the software. Or just omit it. Because nothing would be a lot better than this.