Platform Independent, Searchable Info On CDROM?

Knuckles asks: "A friend of mine, who is an ethnologist, needs to author a CD-ROM with ethnographic source material (4,500 printed pages) on the indigenous population of Mexico. The CD-ROM should provide a platform independent way to retrieve the information with a simple interface and be fully searchable. He is computer literate but doesn't know anything about programming. What solution would you propose? I thought of HTML, but am lost on the question of searchability. Macromedia Director or similar? He would prefer free software, but would use proprietary if better fit for his goals."