UK: DORLING KINDERSLEY'S LIMITLESS VISION.

The commercial and the creative are inseparable, images are as crucial as words - DK thrusts ahead by turning publishing practice on its head.

'The book is dead' proclaims a cheeky placard just outside the boardroom of Dorling Kindersley Holdings (DK) in one of the company's friendly Covent Garden offices. Inside the boardroom, however, the prospects for the book seem less revolutionary. True, a computer stands ready to demonstrate to users the animated wonders of Dorling Kindersley CD-Roms, but the light streaming through the high Georgian windows also falls upon a colourful display of the company's books stretching along the white shelves - tomes crammed with accessible practical information for adult readers and with entertaining enlightenment for children, illuminated with glowing pictures and photographs, punctuated with cross-sections and maps, with every page ingeniously designed to lead the eye from text to image and from diagram to detail.