Interactive (di Danelon Luca, of Italy) may have found a good formula. Compile a bimonthly CD-ROM, grab as much good new stuff as you can find, make sure everything has an icon and is fairly easy to launch, and top it all off with a strong set of commercial demos and two or three registered shareware or commercial 'coverdisk' titles that people might actually want to use. Oh, yeah, and put Eric Schwartz artwork on your CD sleeve and the disc itself.
Started in September 1996 with Volume Zero (I'm not quite sure why), the three entries we were sent reflect their origins and what at the time was a primarily Italian market focus, but the publisher tells me that he's looking to expand distribution to more of Europe and North America, and will be compiling English language versions as well. As it stands now, the AmyResource CDs are geared to an Italian user although a number of the programs on the CDs do have English documentation. The registered packages tend to have both English and Italian documentation, although this is not always the case. (a couple of programs on CD #0 seemed to be Italian-only).
Like I said, it's tough to put together a set of CDs that will continually endear itself to users when they can pick up the really inexpensive Aminet CDs instead. But for all the good stuff on Aminet, and the ease of use of the AmigaGuide interface, it's not necessarily the easiest thing in the world to navigate and also isn't as pretty as a bunch of classy icons would be--and that's what AmyResource does. The only recent general interest CD series I can look at as having great appeal have been magazine covermount CD-ROMs (at the very least, CU Amiga and Amiga Format now offer them monthly) and the more occasional AGA Experience discs, now up to volume 3. The magazines have the advantage of a readerbase looking for things to do with their Amiga and magazine tie-ins, as well as the magazine's coverdisk software (and probably a lot of support material to boot which wouldn't have fit on a floppy.) The AGA Experience CDs tend to gear themselves at being very visual.
AmyResource is a pretty balanced collection, as you would expect something with its frequency to be. Of course, I couldn't get full enjoyment out of everything because of the language barrier, but hitting 'install' is obvious enough in most any language, to set up assigns and so forth.
Volume Zero has a very well thought out collection. There are demo versions of Haage and Partner's software library (ArtEffect, StormC, StormWizard), large parts of Cloanto's library, Cinema4D 3.1, and others. As well, there are a number of game demos, a whole mess of freely redistributable software, a collection of mods, and the commercial/registered versions of ImageStudio 2.3, McFiler, and MUI More. ImageStudio is the attraction here--for a low-end image processor and converter, it can't be beat.
Volume One caused me a bit of trouble with the installer for some reason. The "coverdisk" collection this time is CygnusEd and Amiga E--two very useful packages, although I think CED is pretty dated. Still, lots of people seem to swear by it.
Volume Two -- well, you get the idea here. Given away are Doopsi and WebPlug, the HTML editor.
AmyResource is also now using a Web interface (with AWeb and IBrowse demos provided) to make getting around the CDs easier.
So, keep an eye out for this series when it's released in English. I'm told there's likely to be a "best of" CD to introduce the English versions.