Why I buy this one ?
- 25,700 articles
- 1,570 maps
- 775 audio clips
- 114 videos
- 104 panoramic views

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What our customer's say!

"Terrible", Thought I'd save a few bucks and get a slightly older encyclopedia. Worse mistake I ever made. Nothing worked and nothing was supported. I won't make this mistake again.

"A comparison with the Britannica", The Britannica and the World Book are the two heavyweights in the field, and their strengths are a bit different. Despite recent efforts to make the Britannica more friendly, my favorite encyclopedia for just general reading and reference is the World Book. The Britannica is stronger on science and technology, whereas the World Book is stronger on history and biography, especially American history. Also, I find the Britannica is extremely strong, in my experience, on geography and geology, with the biology and physiology articles being easier. When it comes to the country articles (such as on China, Finland, the U.S.) I find I prefer the World Book's approach, and these articles can run to many dozens of pages. For those mainly interested in American history, you could consider the Encyclopedia Americana, which is cheaper in the print version than either the Britannica or the World Book.

For readability, in the past I would have said the World Book is better, since the Britannica is written more at the college level, but now the DVD version of the Britannica has three writing levels depending on the school level. So the World Book may not be the clear winner there anymore, but most librarians still prefer the World Book to the Britannica as easier to use for schoolchildren. Also, each World Book article adheres to a five-part guideline to enhance its utility as a study tool. You can find more information on the World Book website.

Professional librarians still consider the World Book easier to use, but the Britannica represents the highest technical and difficulty level. One interesting thing the World Book does is that the articles are written to the level of the likely user; for example, the article on cats is written at the grade school level, whereas articles such as geology and the heart are written more at the high school level.

Whichever one you choose, they're both great 'pedias, and actually I have both in the DVD version, since as I said they complement each other. I don't know about the World Book, but the DVD version of the Britannica has 10,000 more articles than the print version! And I wouldn't be surprised if the DVD version of the World Book was similar. Considering that the print version of the Britannica is about $1200, and the World Book is a bit less, and you can have them on DVD for only about $40-$50 each, they're a fantastic buy.

On final comment, both 'pedias boast many video and multimedia clips, but I've tried a lot of them and they tend to be very short, and pretty basic. I think they could just have been left out in many cases, but everyone wants to show how "multimedia" they are these days, so many are included. However, the many thousands of photos are said to have been chosen with great care and I think they did better there. In any case, they're both outstanding reference works and you can't really go wrong with either of them.

"World Book encyclopedia on CD rom", The entire World Book Encyclopedia on a disc plus many extras such as movies, audio recordings, helpful wizards, and more that aren't even in the print version. Plus you don't need a huge strong book shelf to hold the thing.

I got the deluxe version which includes an extra CD of additional data which has to be inserted every time you want to use it. With the first installation disc you can copy all of its data onto your computer and not have to insert that disc every time.

Sure, you can get most of this information off the internet if you want to spend the time, but this is very handy. And for the price you just about can't beat it for a complete encyclopedia. About the only thing better is the Encyclopaedia Britannica on a DVD, which is more extensive and for somewhat older students and is more expensive.