>Later, I introduced the encyclopedia to my kids. They had never used a print encyclopedia, and they looked at me like I was an alien, almost as if I were speaking a different language (such a trite expression, but man, is it accurate). I had hoped they could use the encyclopedia as an old-fashioned reference, but so far, they have completely and utterly rejected it, not even expressing interest or opening it once. That aspect of my plans for the encyclopedia has been a big failure.
The kids' reaction makes perfect sense to me and I grew up with an encyclopedia set in the house.
My family was poor so we couldn't afford the "nice" encyclopedia sets like Encyclopaedia Britannica. Instead, my mom bought the Funk & Wagnalls encyclopedia one-letter-at-a-time from the grocery store. E.g., the grocery store didn't have the entire A-to-Z set at the store. What happened was volume 'A' would be in the aisle near the checkout. You add that one book to your grocery chart. (One book wouldn't blow the whole household budget.) A few weeks later, the volume 'B' would appear. After a few months, you'd eventually end up with entire A to Z set. F&W was the "more affordable" encyclopedia and they brilliantly set up a "installment payment plan" by tapping into mom's weekly shopping habits. Very clever strategy to use supermarkets as the sales channel instead of commissioned door-to-door salesmen. But even that was too much money for us and my mom couldn't afford the entire set in one year. So the volumes she missed had to wait until next year with a new print edition which was a different color. So our encyclopedia set was a Frankenstein set combining different years. A lot of older HN readers will know what I'm talking about.
I used that F&W extensively in school but I don't wish I had another set of books in the house. Today's Wikipedia is much better. It covers thousands of other niche subjects that a limited set like F&W could ever possibly include. And extensive hyperlinks to see how topic-X-leads-to-topic-Y.
The limitations of the old style encyclopedia are immediately obvious when you go to actually use it. Thousands of articles that only barely scratch the surface on the topic. Even then if you're interested in something even mildly obscure it won't be in there at all. Of course you couldn't use it as a source when writing a paper, and worst of all they didn't even provide the sourcing information for the articles that they did have (maybe nicer ones did? The ones at my library did not), so as a research tool they were near useless.
I do remember that there was an exception for the Encyclopedia Britannica, which could be used as a source as long as it wasn't the only source. For some reason it was considered more scholarly than other encyclopedias.
> The limitations of the old style encyclopedia are immediately obvious when you go to actually use it. Thousands of articles that only barely scratch the surface on the topic.
This is a feature not a bug: encyclopedia articles are breadth-first introductions to topics. If you are just mildly curious about something you'll probably get what you need. If you want to know more you'll have a view of the "landscape" and so will probably understand a more specialized book better -- and even be better at finding the right specialized book in the library.
I agree. We had a similar non-mainstream encyclopedia set (not F&W) when I was growing up. I was a voracious reader and, at some point, read them all back to back.
That did not provide me with in-depth knowledge about anything, but even today I have a wide general knowledge, and I am interested in many subjects, some very obscure, which I credit to that encyclopedia.
More importantly, the encyclopedia gave me an overview of human knowledge and helped me to figure out what I was most interested in. The articles about radio, radar, computers and such always fascinated me and, I think, steered me into a career in engineering.
I wonder if that’s wikipedias intent with their simple initiative. You can pull up articles by adding simple in the domain to get a less comprehensive article.
> Of course you couldn't use it as a source when writing a paper
Much the same as wikipedia and similar.
But, like wikipedia, they were sometimes useful starting points with those short articles hopefully giving you a keyword or two, or a reference to other articles in the encyclopedia itself, so you had something useful to search the rest of the library (by hand or by asking the original intelligent search algorithm: a friendly librarian!) for fuller texts about.
Also as a child I remember just randomly skipping to a page and finding some interesting fact, then following the references to elsewhere. I could spend hours learning random things I'd never actually need to know that way!
> Thousands of articles that only barely scratch the surface on the topic.
Same as the Web. My experience has been that more often than not I hit "buy/pirate a book" surprisingly quickly when I start to dig past what's on Wikipedia, which is often not that much. Usually something from a university press.
Not only does Wikipedia have the same problem, they actively enforce it. If you try to add more detail, Wikipedia will reject your material on the grounds that they don't want it.
Not just Wikipedia—often, the rest of the Web doesn't have much more than Wikipedia does (sometimes less, when Wikipedia sources heavily from books), unless you count ebooks. And sometimes the book you need is print-only, even if it's fairly recent.
That's not how you use them. (at least not in my family). It was a read the whole thing deal. So much random knowledge.
We had the WorldBooks, but ran across Encyclopedia Britannica in the school libraries. The Macropaedia was _far_ more in depth than the Micropeadia, or WorldBook at its best.
> It was a read the whole thing deal. So much random knowledge.
Me too. And it taught me a skill that I think was the key to my professional success: learning how apparently unrelated things can give you the key to solving problems or understanding things that are important to you.
As a kid, encyclopedias are great sources of broad information. You probably don't need to go any deeper than they do.
As an adult, encyclopedias are a great starting point, but cannot do anything more than scratch the surface of any subject they cover.
That's just the way it is, I think.
The key advantage that printed encyclopedias have over Wikipedia is that the experts writing the articles are chosen by editors and have to be able to demonstrate broad and authoritative knowledge of the subject, before they're allowed to put those words on paper. Not so with Wikipedia.
I think the idea behind them was you'd read them and when coming across a topic of interest you'd hit up the card catalogue at the library to find books that go deeper into the topic.
This used to be false! I have my dad's copy of the ~1910 encyclopedia Britannica and they were still trying to cover the entirety of the field of mathematics in those years!
My college professors said that an encyclopedia article can't be cited because it's a tertiary source of information. That's considered too far abstracted from the original source of the info to be used as a citation. Primary sources are original documents like the U.S. Constitution; secondary sources are books about the U.S. Constitution that offer some kind of analysis by professionals; tertiary sources are aggregate articles citing multiple analyses, aggregating them together like a Reader's Digest but not contributing further to the discussion like a viewpoint or stance or new info.
All of the above is explained in this article[1] (I just lazily searched for one).
Conversely, Wikipedia policies ask article editors to use only secondary and tertiary sources when writing the encyclopedia (related to the "no original research" policy).
I've got fond memories of my Funk & Wagnalls Science encyclopedia. It was "my" encyclopedia - it wasn't useful for all school projects, but it was great to just read. As opposed to the school library's encyclopedia that was better for more direct queries, but filled with topics I didn't care enough about to read through linearly.
I never associated it with being the budget option, but I don't think my set was comprised of different editions either. Also I think my parents could have afforded a Britannica if they had been turned on to the idea, but they were drawn to buying things incrementally from immediate sales channels. You're spot on about the marketing. I remember them always being prominently at the front of the store. From what I remember the first book was $1 or free with a grocery purchase or something like that, and then of course after reading through that I bugged my Mom to get the next one.
(Also I can't help but notice Macaulay's "How Things Work" on the bookshelf in the article. Another hands-down classic that I would definitely push towards kids today even if they don't take to encyclopedias. I believe he's written a follow up book for modern tech, too)
Macaulay taught Illustration at my college when that book was published. Before that book he made one’s on single topic buildings like cathedral and castle.
“Funk & Wagnalls volumes were typically sold in supermarkets as part of a “book-a-week” program. When Mr. Moser came up with the idea of reducing the normal charge to just pennies for the first volume…
The entire 27-volume Funk & Wagnalls set — along with the free two-volume dictionary, another sweetener dreamed up by Mr. Moser — cost a little more than $100.”
When I was growing up, I was fortunate that we did have an Encyclopedia in the house. My grandfather was a regional sales manager for Fields Enterprises, and sold World Book Encyclopedias. So, we had a full set.
It had all sorts of wonderful things inside, and I remember countless times asking my parents questions after questions and they'd get exasperated with me and tell me to go look it up myself. Six hours later, I would have missed dinner and it would be way past my bed time -- and I would have no concept of how much time had passed.
By sixth grade, I was reading at the college level, and my school had no idea what to do with me.
By the time I got to college and had a job shelving books in the main library on campus, I found out about Encyclopedia Britannica, which was clearly at least twice as big as World Book, and I found out also much more authoritative.
I owe my entire career, and pretty much everything I am to the encyclopedias we had when I was a kid, and my grandfather who made sure we had a set.
Funk & Wagnalls also had an English dictionary in the early 1970s with excellent etymologies, which seem absent from dictionaries when i've looked in a Barnes and Noble store.
I don't know what Barnes & Noble carries in stores or what dictionaries are printed now. Paper dictionaries have limited space for obvious reasons. The paper dictionary that ignored those restrictions, the Oxford English Dictionary OED, was 20+ volumes.
Now most dictionaries are online like encylopedias, again for obvious reasons, and the leading ones at least have etymologies:
The OED is the definitive historical dictionary of English, including its etymologies. Unfortunately it's not free, but you might be a member of an institution that subscribes.
The leading American dictionaries are Merriam-Webster, which has a free edition and a subscription-based unabridged edition (Merriam-Webster now is owned by Britannica, which was American last I knew), and American Heritage, which is free and which has a section on Indo-European and Semitic roots of words.
I had different encyclopedias at home, most of them targeted to kids. There were two which had specific subjects. One, science and the other, the human body. I believe they would have been more helpful than the internet – I did not have the internet, or even a computer at home at the time – because of the tactile experience. On a computer, everything blends together, and you have to do a more conscious effort to recall a particular fact. Later, I had access to Encarta but, I still preferred reading the physical books.
This has shaped my current learning process. I liked to explore a subject instead of getting a direct answer right away. Even when I'm googling, I click on a couple of results first before I'm satisfied. I'm not comfortable with ChatGPT for the same reason.
This takes me back. We had most of a set when I was a kid. I remember many times reading science articles over and over while eating cereal at the kitchen table. I guess not a lot has changed except I read wikipedia (or, let’s be honest, HN) instead.
My oldest child is a voracious reader, but she mostly reads fiction/fantasy. I got her a Neil deGrasse Tyson book that she liked. This article reminds me that I need to provide more of that sort of content.
I read all the scientific articles over-and-over and dipped into the other articles over time. Eventually I think I read much more than half of the full set. Not a bad thing. If we'd had smartphones back then I'm not sure I'd learnt anything useful.
If one talked about illegal download, z library and pdf drive in the past can provide you unlimited academic books. Sadly both gone. I would not have read about quantum field theory … not that I have no access to u library. But you need to surf those books to find one you can “understand” before you dig in. Even buy one as reading read book is so much better.
F&W had a bad reputation (I had a copy as well as a child, for the same reasons, purchased a volume at a time at the grocery store), but it wasn't that bad. Microsoft eventually purchased the rights to it and many of the articles from their 1990s CD-ROM Encyclopedia (Encarta) were either taken directly from F&W or only slightly edited.
That it wasn't a "serious" encyclopedia, probably due to its low cost. Another comment mentioned being allowed to use Encyclopedia Britannica and no other encyclopedia in school because it supposedly was the "most authoritative". It also was the most expensive while F&W was the cheapest (World Book was in between in cost).
Good ol Funk and Wagnalls, we had the same set, bought through the same process...they also had a classical music record collection distributed the same way...volume 1 was Beethoven's 6th, which is one of my favorites to this day...
My mom bought us these, too. But she didn't always go to that supermarket (National, iirc), so we had, say: A-G, K, M-R, and XZY. Or something like that. Still, she was soooo excited when it started that it was infectious.
> The kids' reaction makes perfect sense to me and I grew up with an encyclopedia set in the house.
Same, and same, and I don't know why the author ever expected anything else. You can't give them a hoop&stick and then complain when they'd rather play with, I don't know, I'm old and childless, some modern toy.
I never have, but as a child I received a couple, and they're great fun. In this case my thoughts are twofold. First, it sounds like the kids are old enough to be potential users of the encyclopedia, and more importantly old enough to start choosing their own sources, and the way I remember it that's a bit past the age at which a cardboard box holds much excitement. Second, the article has a picture of the box that the encyclopedia came in, and it doesn't really look all that large to me; I've gotten larger ones than that from amazon plenty of times and I would expect the author has as well.
What was the time period for this. Don't remember this at law. I got 14 year old handme down world books from my cousin and the giant Random House Encyclopedia in the 1970s. Growing up there was nothing but time and the ability to read.
My parents had Encyclopedia Britannica and I'm convinced that was a huge benefit to me that I'm still realizing today. I was born in 1965 and can remember even in elementary school any time I had a question my parents couldn't answer we'd look it up in the EB. Pretty soon I was habituated to just go there on my own and look up anything. When bored I'd pull out a random volume and just flip through it looking for anything that caught my eye.
I'm sure that was no small expense for my parents, but it really was an investment in us kids!
It's wonderful having access to all that and more on your phone, but there was something special about that long row of brown volumes. I was always excited when the annual supplement came; my brother and I would flip through it to see what new knowledge had been discovered!
I grew up with World Book encyclopedias and it was very much the same. Until we got a computer. Encarta was the coolest thing I had ever used and I spent hours playing with the interactive encyclopedia. After that I hardly touched the printed books.
Younger but very similar. Read A to S. I started T and went to college.
I think it cost about $2.5k.
What's odd is my parents never read it as they were illiterate.
I found most of the topics were very short. Going in depth was limited to the library books. Picking six books only to find them referencing themselves was annoying. Six books with 130% total page content between them.
I did learn how to read, skim, absorb content. I also discovered most people simply repeat information instead of using or validating.
In the 80's the encyclopedia filled the same niche that a smartphone does for me now. Whenever I had a small number of minutes to kill I grabbed a random volume and flipped open to a random page.
I think the problem with Special:random is that the long tail of wikipedia isn't that interesting. Someone should make one weighted by wikiproject importance rating.
Nah, it's sites like HN and Reddit that curate the randomness for us. There is / was a service, the name escapes me for now, that would install itself as a hotbar in your browser, press it and it would send you to a random web page, depending on your configured preferences / interests. I'm sure the name will come to me randomly soon enough.
I used to think the library's utility was on an exponential decay, thanks to the internet.
Now, SEO spam has convinced me it's actually a bathtub curve, and is rapidly shooting back up.
This makes sense, historically. I'm sure there was a time when literally anything that had been printed on a printing press was worth reading.
I witnessed the time when anything that had been stored on a CD-ROM was worth reading, since generating CD-ROM worth of data, then producing them was ridiculously expensive (that time period lasted about 1-2 years).
Anyway, early internet, it was hard to publish stuff. As of this year, it's less expensive to write and publish stuff than it is to read it, so curated repositories that are hardened against spam are going to be important again.
There's a toplevel option called "random article" as well as the shortcut ctrl+option+x to go to a random article. If anything it's a way better serendipity generator.
There are way too many articles on Wikipedia for a completely random single article to be likely to be interesting. What would be better is if it generated a list of about 20 different random articles in a summarized list, like search engine results.
Perhaps even better would be if, instead is drawn from the entire Wikipedia, the list was generated from a pool of articles that are at most N links separated from your current page.
Both HN & encyclopia's are curated sets of articles that work similarly when in a "filling time" mode -- they present you with a set of articles and you read the interesting ones.
Do you think there was better ROI to that time spent than now with the smartphone? Like, you "killed" those 5mins by learning something (however esoteric it may have been) versus sucked into a nonsensical Tik Tok vortex?
> In the 80's the encyclopedia filled the same niche that a smartphone does for me now.
I took this to mean the niche is "learning something interesting in a short amount of time" not "killing a short amount of time" so to me the OP implied they were using the smartphone to learn and not browse TikTok.
It's both? I have the attention span of a gnat so whenever I'm forced to wait in one place for more than 10 seconds I pull my phone out. I don't pull up TikTok, but I pull up HN or similar. Theoretically HN et al can be educational, but it's mostly functioning as an alternative to TikTok.
This behaviour is normal today, but 40 years ago people other than me had the ability to wait patiently.
>When she saw the large photo of a shark spread across the spines of the 22 volumes, she frowned and said, "I don't want to see a big-ass shark every day when I walk in the room."
I've got to be honest, reading this I went through a similar range of emotions as the author: Surprise that a print encyclopedia still exists, curiosity about it, and a nibbling desire to buy one. But I gotta agree with his wife: I don't want a huge shark photo on my bookshelf. It seems like an odd thing to force on a $1200 purchase, especially when it could easily be put on dust covers that could be removed to leave a more austere, proper looking reference book.
I agree. The big shark photo would be fine in a school library or classroom (especially if it helps younger users put volumes back in the correct place), but it’s completely out of place for a home library.
I remember the world book as having brown/beige with gold letters. It was a boring look that actually seemed to give it authority. The photo on the cover/spine makes it seem like it’s desperate for your attention. Almost like clickbait working it’s way into the analog world
I rather like it, actually. It's a cool photo and I find it to be a nice art piece, kind of like an art print on the wall, versus a bunch of brown book spines. But I understand your viewpoint, too. Worth remembering that their biggest customer-base by far is libraries and schools, where something like that might be a better fit than a home bookshelf.
I for one find it sympathetic that they are trying to appeal to schoolchildren (who are supposed to use it) instead of adult tastes. I wonder how much is it based on market motivation? If you want a set of serious looking tomes as a visual thing, there are plenty of options on the market. If you are really serious, you can even re-bind them custom. Which I'd find kind of ridiculous for this set, but I think this is what people do to have a lawyer-style consistent looking library for show. (Of course for some books that are old and breaking apart it's a good option anyway.)
There is some value in having physical references, but for adults I would gravitate toward academic handbooks and such for topics that interest me. Could be ones for freshmen depending on my background, and ones from some years back should be okay for many subjects.
That's fair, and I think everyone is right on the money that the pictures make it more appealing to children and easier to put back in order.
I suppose were I to entertain this idea for myself, since it's mostly a vanity/interest project rather than a functional one, it's not like it would be out of the question to have them re-bound. I wonder what the cost would be.
The 2022 edition has a dinosaur on it while the 2021 edition has eagles, for what it’s worth. I am tempted to buy the eagle one for only $350 … but I don’t really have the space for it!
The original Encyclopedias in the 1700s was a major catalyst similar in impact to the internet for us. Especially when specialized ones developed in the 19th century. The cool thing about using a Encyclopedia is the random encounters with things outside of your initial search. I'd argue it has a higher information density in your field of view when you look at a pair of pages. Of course I'm an early Gen-X who continued to use research libraries well into the 21st century. I still advise youth to use library time as part of research as the serendipity of finding other information both within you interest in the general shelf area, seeing similar periodicals and even just other articles within a journal. And any university's reference sections are loaded with simply amazing stuff ontop of their information index subscriptions.
This got my attention. I recall reading my World Book encyclopedia back when I was a kid in the 1950s for many, many absorbing hours. Tremendous enjoyment.
I see that Amazon's selling the 2023 edition for $1200 BUT World Book is selling the 2022 edition new for $500 and the 2021 edition new for $400. There are many eBay sellers offering the 2020 edition used for $300.
This might be the best present EVER for my now 7-year-old grandson who can read but whose parents limit his iPad use to 1 hour/day.
In Germany the „Brockhaus Enzyklopädie“ used to have its place in every academic house hold. The 24 volume version filled an entire cupboard on its own, cost thousands but looked great with the volumes’ red shaded back and golden rims. Especially historic and technical articles were quite large and detailed and helped me with many homework assignments in the age before the Internet. They were much better than the typical CD-ROM based encyclopedias.
I am lucky to own the last print edition from back in 2006 (inherited from my father) that even contains an entry explaining what „Wikipedia“ is. My kids never want to use it. It’s depressing and amusing at the same time.
We have an old set, and some friends were over with their third grader, who had to write a report. She tried using wikipedia, but it popped up a 30 page article on an advanced topic she was trying to find a definition of.
I handed her the encyclopedia, and showed her how to look up the word. One paragraph later, she said "that's EXACTLY what I needed."
I don't find modern encyclopedias interesting, but the older encyclopedias (and textbooks) are fascinating. Specifically I love reading entries before major changes to a field. Like cells in 1950, right before the double helix structure of DNA was discovered. Or Germany in the inter war period, when everyone knew it was unstable, but no one was quite sure what that meant.
I don't know what modern encyclopedias are like (assuming you're referring to physical ones), but I really do think I learned more from encyclopedias and textbooks than from class when I was in school. Some teachers were brilliant and could teach effectively, but in most cases I really was better off just reading through the books, which I actually enjoyed.
If modern encyclopedias are like Wikipedia, then I can see how you wouldn't find them interesting. Although Wikipedia does have interesting information within it, it's now written so verbosely that my eyes glaze over most of the time. Yeah, there's simple.wikipedia.org, but it's not nearly complete enough.
> Like cells in 1950, right before the double helix structure of DNA was discovered.
I had a textbook in middle school that was so old that it said bacteria were believed to be a form of plant!
>
If modern encyclopedias are like Wikipedia, then I can see how you wouldn't find them interesting. Although Wikipedia does have interesting information within it, it's now written so verbosely that my eyes glaze over most of the time. Yeah, there's simple.wikipedia.org, but it's not nearly complete enough.
The problem with the writing
in Wikipedia articles is that they are often extremely detailed in certain aspects, because more and more people kept adding specific bits to it. But then often the overall cohesiveness of the article is lost, and it becomes hard to read.
The problem is that Wikipedia articles usually don't have single authors which would ensure the article as a whole is compelling.
There is actually an encyclopedia which does much better in this regard: The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. It's a free online source, like Wikipedia, and it is limited to topics of philosophy, but it reads so much better. Even though many of its articles are quite long. Each article is written by an expert in the field. It is the encyclopedia in analytic philosophy.
One problem is that sometimes articles are slightly biased because the author has certain views, and this isn't at all obvious unless you're already an expert in this topic. Still, most articles are great.
Everything educational from 1895 to the end of WWI in the US is deeply, overtly racist - race is inserted into places where one wouldn't even expect it. I'm fascinated by reading the stuff. Especially geography textbooks.
Even into the mid 90s, the extinction of the dinosaurs was an unsolved question. It's really interesting to see how people thought about this over time.
Born in the late 90s, I spent an absurd amount of time on wikipedia in my teens. It's lack of depth on common topics at the time led me to libraries and the world of books.
As an adult, it's amazing to see how far Wikipedia has come. In spite of its perennial and well-documented issues, it has to be one of humanity's biggest accomplishments.
I think teaching "the youth" how to efficiently investigate and retrieve information is probably one of the best skills we can pass on. In 2023, I'm not sure if there's much utility for a "generic" encyclopedia in that skill tree. Although encyclopedias with an intentionally-constrained focus are still pretty valuable, IME.
I loved reading my grandfather's 1980s edition World Book when visiting, pre internet. There was something kind of magical about that much information in one place at the time, but at a house instead of a library!
Edit: I also remember browsing the Macintosh version of the Encyclopedia Britannica as one of my first school computer activities.
My quiet, somewhat socially anxious mother sold World Book door to door in the late sixties to get her family a copy for free. I really think those volumes were greatly responsible for the positive trends in my life.
I loved reading the World book and following where the bread crumbs led. As I write this more comes back- I remember "E" was probably the best starting point with all the electricity articles. Amazingly, although not detailed, the recipe for gunpowder was there. Ah the memories :) Thank you World Book and most of all Thank You Mom!!
I remember redirecting from article to article. Sometimes I would end in a loop. Even back then I sometimes became suspicious that unknown forces were hiding some things from me. Too many times tantalizing subjects would be mentioned and then dropped with no further information available.
> At a time when most information comes to us for free online (with strings attached, of course), it's easy to have sticker shock at the $1,199 retail price for the 2023 edition of World Book, although shoppers might occasionally find it for as low as $799 on Amazon (to compare, the online subscription costs $250 per year)
I understand that there is some economy of scale issue. (I would expect them to have very few buyers) But this price is hard to justify. Does it cost $949 to print and ship, when comparing the online edition to the physical edition?
That sounds so cheap to me. My 11th edition of Encyclopedia Brittanica cost maybe $4000, and I have to do maintenance to fight off dust mites and red rot. But it looks very good, and it's widely considered the best Encyclopedia. Apprently Wikipedia started out as a project to digitize 11th Britannica. It's public domain now, so you can read it on your phone free if you're interested in ruining all the charm.
I've been hearing this since the pre-web days. Most of the people saying it, as I remember, were either Jerry Pournelle or his fellow travelers, and even as a youth I had to wonder how much of that was just nostalgia for the peak of the British Empire and all that went along with it.
I think it's actually less when adjusted for inflation. I recall full sets like this being close to $2000 even way back when. Of course, back then you'd often "subscribe" to them, paying a smaller monthly fee and getting one book per month until you had the full set.
Used books were a thing even way back when; as a child in the mid-'80s, I bought (with my parents' money) a complete Encyclopædia Britannica set at the opening "friends and family" night of our local public library system's annual book sale for $100 or so, in "like new" condition and barely out of date.
If you're old, when we were kids we needed encyclopedias to read anything (esp. nonfiction.) You can't understand a book if you don't know any of its references, and you're not going to go to the library to look up all of them. All you had is what you'd stored up in your head, and the encyclopedias in the basement.
They were nice to kill idle time following references, just like Wikipedia is now, but they were essential for reading nonfiction at home.
> Opening up a volume of the World Book took me back in time.
> ...
> As for its content, the 2023 edition doesn't shy away from the contemporary.
Yeah, there's a weird schism there. I am considering now trolling the local thrift stores and antique malls for a complete encyclopedia set — but one perhaps from the 70's or 80's. I'll save a bundle and can go back to a world that frankly seemed a lot more optimistic.
That's a contradiction, albeit surely an unintentional one. Only electronic text is fully and automatically accessible to the blind, visually impaired, and dyslexic. I assume that in this context, "accessible to all" is intended to mean that it's accessible to people without computers. How big a problem is that these days?
Also, this encyclopedia is only accessible to those who pay $1200, who can only access it if they are physically in the room where the buyer has installed it. That's not accessible in my view.
I had a number of volumes of really nice looking books on the shelf growing up. There was the encyclopedia set which was ok, but also collections of stories, museum collections, city reference books. They're great because you can grab anything and usually find interesting well written good quality content. Even the worst of them, and there are bad books, are at least well written.
Anyway, I recently found out the volumes were selected by my architect uncle to coordinate with the built-in bookshelves. They were just intended as a visual prop, but I've taken a few of the classics and museum sets with me and still enjoy flipping through.
Many older generation scholars had the same gut feeling about the 1911 11th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica and claimed, with some justice, that it was the last “truly” comprehensive summary of human knowledge.
Of course this was due to the mismatch between the maximum practical and economical size of an encyclopedia and the rate of gain of knowledge beginning in the early 20th century.
When I was 23 years old in 1976 I won a $125 award at Alta Bates Hospital in Berkeley for a faster way to stock the wards. I bought a gorgeous leather-bound gilt-edged copy of the 1911 Britannica for precisely $125 at a huge used bookstore in downtown Oakland—-all 29 volumes, each volume just under 1000 pages.
That 11th edition has always held a place of honor in our home (well, my significant other does not have quite the same warm feelings as I do since $125 was a bucket-load of money when we were getting started).
It makes for interesting reading.
It would be amusing to add the World Book encyclopedia of 2044 to the collection although I doubt my kids or grandkids would be quite as amused as me.
I still possess my grandfather's 1911 Encylopedia Britannica. I didn't fully realize just how old it was until I looked up Nicholas II and the entry began by identifying him as the current Tsar of Russia.
Between http-serve, git clone, yt-dl and various emulators internet access is hardly a necessity unless you enjoy seeding or arguing, and the latter is currently being deprecated by local models.
> First, I'll be honest: The existence of an up-to-date print encyclopedia in 2023 took me by surprise.
In contrast, the fact that there is only one remaining (English-language) print encyclopedia is something that took me by surprise. I'm not sure how many is reasonable to expect, but I'd have thought it was >1.
Growing up in the 80's we had a set of 1960's world book encyclopedias. I would read them for fun. Sort of the same sort of thing as hitting random on wikipedia today, but in alphabetical order. Admittedly I suspect my love of reading is largely due to not having a tv growing up.
Some people say they read the dictionary for fun, which I never understood, dictionaries are boring. encyclopedias are much more interesting. (probably why I am unable to spell worth a damn today)
And if you were wondering C was the best volume, although I cant remember why.
I liked the old encyclopedias so much more than the modern ones, as a kid it was fun to look up articles that were significantly outdated. "Here's an artist's rendering of life on Venus may look like"
Hard to quantify without a set of both side by side to compare. But the writing was better in the old ones. I would describe it as more technically competent.
My parents bought a set of World Book when my sister and I were in elementary school. It might be the most important purchase they ever made for our education, as it not only helped with our information gathering for reports and whatnot, but was entertainment for us when bored. We loved just hopping into a random page and reading about whatever that thing was. It made me the info-junkie I am today, I think.
This has got me thinking about buying a set for my friends with kids (I'll check with them first and see if they have the shelf real estate).
Bought a World Book set at last year's Berkshire Hathaway meeting, for something like $650 including shipping. Awesome deal.
My kids (10, 8) earn "check marks" for each 20 minute chunk of time they spend reading it, which they can trade in for various goodies. Usually before they go to sleep
Edit: Also, they have used it for school projects. 2nd grader had projects on Poland, Neil Armstrong, and pygmy rattlesnakes this year. Very handy as an introduction to a wide variety of topics.
I used the world book (2021) to reduce the need for computer use in my kids. They have computers, but they are Alphamsmart Danas and they can use them to write, code in C, play chess, and read books I load on there.
The World Book has great articles and I learn plenty from it too. One unique thing is the authors of each article are listed. When I read an interesting article, I email the author and engage with them further, which often leads to more interesting insights.
I credit my grandma's encyclopedia Britannica from the 70s with sparking my interest in engineering. In particular, there were these very detailed diagrams of every stage of the moon landing as well as diagrams of rockets from the Mercury to the Saturn V. It was fairly magical in a time before Wikipedia.
I think the fact that it was higher-level and structured benefited me. Nowadays it's much easier to dive deep into something which is kind of beautiful. If you want to see the detailed schematics for the Saturn V, it's a click away. If you want to sit down and program on a simulated guidance computer, you can (MoonJS).
I do wonder if my younger self would be able to "go broad" when presented with information this easy to attain. I notice my nephews have a tendency to "go deep" and at age 8 they're diving into every nuanced detail of something like the Titanic and then re-creating it in Minecraft. I envy that access to information at a young age but I wonder if it prevents them from going broad when they're fixated on a particular topic for a year.
Overall, I think I'd still prefer Wikipedia if I was born today.
I probably would have appreciated such an encyclopedia as a kid. I actually got a "computer encyclopedia" (a single heavy book with way over a thousand pages) as a birthday present once, and I simply read through it from start to finish, brute force style, skipping only the most boring articles. My attention span was almost unlimited back then.
When MS Encarta came out in 1993 our household got it, too. I did the same thing on our 486 beige box: just hit the arrow button on articles, reading through as many as I could.
With my Reddit habit probably soon coming to an end, it might be a good time to readjust my attention span, haha.
We have the 1997 edition. It costed us 1,000₹/12$ for a single book( it has around 30 in a set) which was a lot of money for my dad in 1997. Surprisingly the color photos still pop, the page quality is brilliant and it's built like a freaking tank. It was like browsing the internet during the late 1990s.
World Book was always the most terrible Encyclopedia when I was growing up 1968-1984. Overly short articles and tons of color pictures; only suitable for 10-yrs and younger. When sent to do a book report in my elementary School library I knew I would always come up short on information if I relied on "The World Book."
Encyclopedia Americana was the thing to own and was IMHO better than the Brittainica. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclopedia_Americana . We owned the Encyclopedia Americana, The Book of Science (a 10-volume science encyclopedia), and a family medical guide.
I remember using the Barsa[0] encyclopedia as a source for homework. We went to my grandfather's house where this imposing collection of red and gold hard cover books rested at the higher shelf. Even an adult had to get on a chair to reach there. I'm pretty sure is still there almost as a trophy or decoration piece. It's probably useless nowadays and I'm pretty sure it still lists the Soviet Union and Rhodesia as countries. Back when I've used those books they already had the smell of old books.
And yes I would love to have those books for myself.
For me, the idea of having it on paper, is also that the definition of words can't be changed to please modern sensibilities.
I reckon I don't have an encyclopaedia – my parents didn't have that much money growing up, and now, I don't have that much space available (not sure if they are even printed in my language anymore). But I do have a very prized (personally) big dictionary from the 80s, that my father used with his studies.
It's scary, to see how certain words totally changed their meaning in a few decades, and it's great to be able to go and look them out to get some context on a few themes. Be certain, that the Overton window, did move radically in one direction.
We had a printed encyclopedia growing up - I assume it was bought used, but don't know. My Dad was an academic which must be part of why he saw value in it. I forget which encyclopedia it was, but something pretty comprehensive occupying a couple of feet of shelf space.
As a kid I read the entire encyclopedia cover to cover from A-Z! Hard to say what I retained from that, but no doubt quite a bit, as well as the curiosities that were satisfied even if the content was later forgotten. I couldn't see doing the same with WikiPedia - there's something about the finite physicality of a set of encyclopedias that does seem to beckon for them to be read!
I would buy a historical edition of Brittanica, not a 2023 version of the World Book. It would be eye-opening to see how people thought of the world before the speed and hyper-connectivity of the internet.
If you have a 'buy nothing' community, just lurk on there. Many enclopedia sets go, I got a 1990 Brittanica with the yearly update volume for nothing a couple years ago. If nothing else, I've got monitor risers for life.
I don't speak Danish but I remember how amazing is their encyclopedia "Lille Salmonsen", one I "read" every evening in my hotel room in Kopenhagen. It was 1940 edition. Somehow with my German and English, and a bit of common knowledge, I could "read" it and it's really interesting, illustrated encyclopedia, reflecting Danish history, language, character, and probably their "thinking". This is one of those physical books I would like to have at least in our local public library.
My favorite reference book is "Desk Ref", which is the larger fatter version of "Pocket Ref".
Obviously everything in it can be looked up online, but I just don't like being tied to having an internet connection. I don't have the greatest memory in the world, and am happy to outsource my knowledge to an outboard secondary brain, so actual physical reference books are quite reassuring to me.
I still have great memories laying on the living room floor reading volume after volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica during family TV evenings. The set came with a language dictionary covering 5-10 languages; I spent endless hours "learning" Russian and Arabic from that book. I still have those books and the cabinet they were sold with.
I grew up with the World Book set as well. Seemed like there were more books/pages (or maybe thicker pages/smaller print). We also had a set of Funk and Wagnalls as well as a Disney set of the future world. They were a constant passtime, but even as a child certain topics ended far too briefly. Today we have Wikipedia to follow up.
I still have my 1979 set (with 1980 Year Book!) - I traded in a 1952 set I inherited from a (much older) cousin. Funnily enough, a lot of the articles were the same (quite a few of the experiments, in particular) and of course the articles about pre-Eisenhower presidents.
It's great for stabilizing my freestanding Ikea bookshelf, though.
> My family's reaction was disappointing, but I don't mind that the encyclopedia set is just for me.
That's just coping after burning a bit of money on an useless shelf decoration... I'm sure he will use it occasionally instead of wikipedia just to feel he didn't threw away that money.
I bought a new set in 2009 to ‘enrich’ the kids. They never read it, but the books came in handy for crafts when you need to weight something down and for securing marble-coaster and hotwheel tracks at the top of the stairs.
I started reading them from start to finish. Gave up after a while, but at least I now know a lot of trivia about things that start with A, B, C, and D.
I used to go to my school library's reference section because I loved to read the Brittanica
Does anyone know what kind of paper was used for its printing? It was good in quality to not have bleed through, but sheer enough to have several hundred pages per volume.
This is a massive exaggeration. My daughter reads encyclopedias I buy for her, just as I did.l back in the day. And it wasn't horribly popular to be the book reading kid 30 years ago as well.
I've been seriously thinking about getting a complete set of good printed encyclopedias. I am inspired now. Perhaps I can find a secondhand set of Encyclopedia Britannica.
I have tons of memories of reading my parents' World Book Encyclopedia growing up. Honestly, getting a print copy for my kids to browse through doesn't seem a bad idea.
I inherited the set of WB Encyclopedias my parents bought for our family when I was a kid. We could not sell them in the yard sale and the library didn't want them as a donation.
I decided to keep them as a 'decoration' for my new office. There is some nostalgia for me and I will probably crack one open now and then.
I think it is naïve to believe that just because the Internet is full of disinformation that alters regularly at the speed of light; that a print version will protect you from that. While the older versions are less likely to be infiltrated; the biases have existed long enough that plenty of propaganda has made it into print.
My takeaway from the article is that it's more about the novelty and nostalgia, but also could serve a purpose--and that purpose is more about bad information being available online than about it going away.
> Aside from the shark photo and the print error, I am genuinely proud to own a modern World Book Encyclopedia. And I say that freely, having purchased the set out of pocket myself.
If the author had to buy it with his own money, it's a pretty lame sponsored post.
The kids' reaction makes perfect sense to me and I grew up with an encyclopedia set in the house.
My family was poor so we couldn't afford the "nice" encyclopedia sets like Encyclopaedia Britannica. Instead, my mom bought the Funk & Wagnalls encyclopedia one-letter-at-a-time from the grocery store. E.g., the grocery store didn't have the entire A-to-Z set at the store. What happened was volume 'A' would be in the aisle near the checkout. You add that one book to your grocery chart. (One book wouldn't blow the whole household budget.) A few weeks later, the volume 'B' would appear. After a few months, you'd eventually end up with entire A to Z set. F&W was the "more affordable" encyclopedia and they brilliantly set up a "installment payment plan" by tapping into mom's weekly shopping habits. Very clever strategy to use supermarkets as the sales channel instead of commissioned door-to-door salesmen. But even that was too much money for us and my mom couldn't afford the entire set in one year. So the volumes she missed had to wait until next year with a new print edition which was a different color. So our encyclopedia set was a Frankenstein set combining different years. A lot of older HN readers will know what I'm talking about.
I used that F&W extensively in school but I don't wish I had another set of books in the house. Today's Wikipedia is much better. It covers thousands of other niche subjects that a limited set like F&W could ever possibly include. And extensive hyperlinks to see how topic-X-leads-to-topic-Y.