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I love encyclopedias. Always have. When I was in grade school, I had a deal with my teacher that if I finished my classroom assignments before the end of the period, I could go read the World Book Encyclopedia for the remaining time. This speeded up my work efficiency immensely, because I loved that World Book.

I was eventually able to convince the keeper of the domestic exchequer that an encyclopedia would be a wise investment in my a educational future, and we got our own World Book, followed a few years later by the more grown up-oriented 1966 edition of Collier's Encyclopedia, which I still have and refer to frequently. My home-schooled kids have also used that old Collier's extensively, although they have had access to the Grolier's Multimedia Encyclopedia and Infopedia 2 on CD-ROM as well.

Over the years, I have of course admired the uber-encyclopedia of all -- the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which for 233 years (since 1768) has been the English-speaking world's most respected name in general reference resources. Including information on historical topics as well as contemporary world culture, the Encyclopaedia Britannica offers articles edited and revised by some of the world`s foremost scholars and experts, and written by over 4,000 contributors including such renowned individuals as Milton Friedman, Carl Sagan, and Michael DeBakey, covering the historic and political, the literary and cultural, and the scientific and technological. In short, Encyclopaedia Britannica covers the spectrum of mankind`s knowledge.

However, the print edition of Britannica always seemed an unjustifiable discretionary expenditure when we already had the Collier's and a couple of CD-ROM editions. That is, until my highschool senior daughter picked up a late-eighties edition of the Britannica this fall for Can$100.

These days, there is a much less expensive option for Britannica aficionados -- the complete reference on CD-ROM or DVD for a fraction of the US$1,295 price of a full set of print volumes.

For the past couple of years, there has been no Mac version of the disk edition of Britannica, but that has been rectified for 2002 with the release of two Mac-compatible Britannicas on disk.

The subject of this review is the Encyclopaedia Britannica for 2002 Expanded Edition on DVD for Mac. It's amazing that the entire encyclopedia with multimedia resources can fit on a single DVD disk, but it does, and for the very reasonable price of $69.95. There's also a Mac OS X/Windows cross-platform CD-ROM edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2002 for $39.95. This product positioning is a bit odd, since the low-end version requires OS X, while the Deluxe version will run under OS 8.6.

Next >

Encyclopedia Britannica 2002 Expanded Edition DVD Review Part 2

Encyclopedia Britannica 2002 Expanded Edition DVD Review Part 3

Charles W. Moore

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