Others say...

"Encyclopedia Britannica Ultimate 2008"
GREAT IDEA!!! A must GET for any college student who must do research papers. The DVD gives two types of citations: MLA AND APA. Both are needed in today's colleges. One year of free updates, online Britannica, and other items just sweeten the deal. Again a MUST GET/GREAT IDEA for any college student.

"Awesome"
This was the best gift I could've given to my sister's family with kids ranging in age from 2 to 9 yrs! Very cool with a large multi-media section.

"Academic database of wisdom two and a half centuries in the making"
The Encyclopædia Britannica was first published in 1768 and still remains the best scholarly volume of knowledge available, and now at a breathtakingly cheap price. Subsequent editions of the Encyclopædia Britannica took decades to update but the tome would double and triple in size each time. In 19th century the Encyclopædia Britannica had gone from 1 book to 20. By the first decade of the 20th century the Encyclopædia Britannica had grown to 29 with over 40,000 articles.

In the course of the 1950s the Encyclopædia Britannica established a worldwide editing team to give the publication global representation. This era of the Encyclopædia Britannica is widely regarded as one of the most expensive and work demanding investments ever undertaken for a publication. Over 4,000 scholars where assembled for this project.

During the 1970s until the 1990s the Encyclopædia Britannica went through restructuring into different categories to make the articles easier to access. The finalized version (1985-present) consists of a 32 volume set and is the one that this software is based on.

The next major transformation took place in the early 1990s when the Encyclopædia Britannica took advantage of the CD-ROM revolution. The digital technology innovators claimed that the new data storage medium could be compared to containing the entire Encyclopædia Britannica on one disc. The Encyclopædia Britannica was released on one disc becoming one of the most popular software packages available on the new CD-ROM format.

Along with providing one of the most comprehensive Encyclopædias available for computers, the Encyclopædia Britannica hosts the domain Britannica on the Internet.

Even though the Internet revolution offered considerable challenges to the Encyclopædia Britannica, such as Google's search engine capabilities, Wikipedia the free on-line Encyclopaedia, along with Microsoft's Encarta software, the Encyclopædia Britannica still has a powerhouse collection of articles that are edited by a staff of academics that are specialized in each field. You are guaranteed quality information. This makes the Encyclopædia Britannica a dependable resource for anybody who just wants to get their facts about the world right. Journalists depend on it, as do researchers and students alike.

The Encyclopædia Britannica has over a whopping 100,000 articles to read.

The Encyclopædia Britannica, for the full experience, takes up 4 GB of drive space. It is still on one disc although the medium is now a single DVD and not a CD. Even on high-end machines the Encyclopædia Britannica can take quite some time to install, so be prepared to wait around while 4 GB of data extracts onto your computer. The Encyclopædia Britannica software runs like a web browser and resembles Apple's Operating System widgets. Quickly the Encyclopædia Britannica becomes a workspace. You can browse timelines, view the atlas, or explore popular events. There is a nice brainstormer, powered by TheBrain software, which allows you to go through huge sections of material by category, very rapidly.

The Encyclopædia Britannica A-Z is always going to stand out as the reason to own this package. The material is just so well presented in terms of the quality of English, layout and the vast array of support material including graphics, videos, many of which the user can interact with. The search feature not only pulls up direct articles, but also one's linked to it, images and a book of the year list.

There are a few downsides but they are minor. One is that the package is the equivalent of opening up several intensive web pages over a web browser. If your system hangs or slows down considerably if you open up lots of new tabs or windows with content heavy pages, then you can expect the Encyclopædia Britannica to act the same way. It has always been a hardware intensive package and still continues to be. So make sure your PC is in order for it. The other thing is that it requires you to register or else you will be asked every time you use it with a pop-up that doesn't stop until you do. It is a little annoying. The only way to turn it off is to register. It is also nice to have the Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary imbedded in the software but it is just a basic dictionary search and thesaurus and lacks any advanced power like the full version dictionary. However the Encyclopædia Britannica itself makes up for these minor quibbles.

Overall the Encyclopædia Britannica does one other thing well which all others fail to do. It makes you want to read it from start to finish. Many people have done this and it is a completely viable option given that you do a little bit each day over the course of a year or more depending on how much you do. Where other Encyclopædias are for reference, the Encyclopædia Britannica almost demands to be read. You just know the experience would be time well spent.

The Encyclopædia Britannica could very well be one of the most important items you could ever own. Education is the best investment you can make.

"Britannica 2008"
This product is excellent for the advanced high-school, beginning college student. More reliable than wikipedia, the articles provided by this resource are informative and probe 'beyond the surface.'

"Great except for one issue"
This is an amazing electronic reference in many ways. It has three levels of difficulty depending on the school level, from elementary to intermediate to adult, includes the Merriam Webster dictionary, and thesaurus. It has some new features that are quite useful, such as the Britannica brainstorm, a way of organizing your research, and a new interface from the one I had with the older 2003 version.

It's a great encyclopedia and it's strengths are in science, technology, geography, and various specialized topics, and to a lesser degree biography and history. The World Book is just the opposite: it's strengths are in biography and world and U.S. history, so really, the two great 'pedias complement each other.

Librarians in the past prefered the World Book because the writing level was more approachable, and could be used by schoolchildren, but the the Britannica has now solved that issue with these new levels of writing. The World Book is in some ways still easier to use, but the Britannica still represents the highest level of scholarship and technical difficulty.

My main issue is with the new interface, I just don't like it as much and prefer the older one, but perhaps that's a matter of taste. But that's the reason for the four instead of five stars. The new interface has more context sensitive windows or frames, which is useful, and the bookmarking capability is cool, which I don't think my earlier edition had.

Anyway, it's a great reference tool and one that I'm very pleased with, and It's still the standard by which all the others are measured.