Rainbow Books

The Rainbow Books are a collection of CD format specifications generally written and published by standards bodies including the ISO, IEC, and ECMA.

For the series of U.S. government publications on computer security standards, see Rainbow Series. For pre-Internet communications protocols, see Coloured Book protocols. For the "Reading Rainbow" children's television series, see Reading Rainbow.
Illustration depicting each format by color.
Optical discs
General
Optical media types
Standards
See also

Red Book (1980)
  • CD-DA (Digital Audio) – standardized as IEC 60908
    • CD-Text—a 1996 extension to CD-DA
    • CD-MIDI—part of the original red-book standard
    • CD+G (plus Graphics) – karaoke

Yellow Book (1983)
  • CD-ROM (Read-Only Memory)[1][2] – standardized as ISO/IEC 10149[3] in 1988 and ECMA-130[4] in 1989
    • CD-ROM XA (eXtended Architecture) – a 1991 extension of CD-ROM

Green Book (1986)

Orange Book (1990)

Orange is a reference to the fact that red and yellow mix to orange. This correlates with the fact that CD-R and CD-RW are capable of audio ("Red") and data ("Yellow"); although other colors (other CD standards) that do not mix are capable of being burned onto the physical medium. Orange Book also introduced the standard for multisession writing.

  • CD-MO (Magneto-Optical)
  • CD-R (Recordable) alias CD-WO (Write Once) alias CD-WORM (Write Once, Read Many) – partially standardized as ECMA-394
  • CD-RW (ReWritable) alias CD-E (Eraseable) – partially standardized as ECMA-395

Beige Book (1992)

White Book (1993)

Blue Book (1995)

Scarlet Book (1999)

Scarlet color of this book is a reference to the Red Book, which defines original CDDA.

Purple Book (2000)
  • DDCD (Double Density)

See also
  • ISO 9660, a 1986 filesystem standard used in conjunction with CD-ROM formats.
  • Orange-Book-Standard, a decision named after the Compact Disc standard, issued in 2009 by the German Federal Court of Justice on the interaction between patent law and standards

References
  1. "InfoWorld Vol. 16, No. 23". InfoWorld. June 6, 1994. p. 88. Retrieved March 25, 2020.
  2. "Proceedings of the 5th Annual Federal Depository Library Conference". U.S. Government Printing Office. April 15–18, 1996. p. 11. Retrieved February 10, 2022.
  3. ISO (1995). "ISO/IEC 10149:1995 – Information technology – Data interchange on read-only 120 mm optical data disks (CD-ROM)". Archived from the original on 2019-01-15. Retrieved 2010-08-06.
  4. "Data Interchange on Read-only 120 mm Optical Data Disks (CD-ROM)". ECMA. June 1996. Retrieved 2009-04-26. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
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