> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
> 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?
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.
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.
>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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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).
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!
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'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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.”
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...
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.
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).
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.
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.
> 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.
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 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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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[ 17.5 ms ] story [ 4478 ms ] threadIf the author had to buy it with his own money, it's a pretty lame sponsored post.
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.
This behaviour is normal today, but 40 years ago people other than me had the ability to wait patiently.
There's something to be said about not having ubiquitous portable distraction devices to encourage more "productive" uses of time.
Like you, I am remembering the serendipity of the encyclopedia (and libraries for that matter).
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.
Open two tabs with random wikipedia articles. See how many clicks it takes to get from the first article to the second by just clicking links.
It's pretty fun and educational.
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.
Edit: I also remember browsing the Macintosh version of the Encyclopedia Britannica as one of my first school computer activities.
If you're worried though, download a copy today :)
Could be a wrong.print. could be a fake.
Bible is also not true just because it's some book.
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?
Actually, maybe funny is the wrong word, it's kind of sweet.
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.
Ernest Rutherford, Bertrand Russell, T.H. Huxley, James Jeans, Peter Kropotkin
Before or after 1911, this level of scholar would not typically be found writing encyclopedia entries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclop%C3%A6dia_Britannica_E...
https://archive.org/details/encyclopdiabrita12chic/page/n307...
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 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
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.
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.
Gen X: Dead stare, mouth open, winces, grips Encarta CDs tightly
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!
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.
I just assumed that I hadn't done enough philosophising, and had come to the Wrong conclusion. Glad to see it's not just me!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
I think that in one of Woody Allen films a character complains about a restaurant that "the food is terrible and the portions are too small"
Why not?
All of the above is explained in this article[1] (I just lazily searched for one).
Sources: 1: https://crk.umn.edu/library/primary-secondary-and-tertiary-s...
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 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)
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.
So it wouldn't be too presumptuous to treat the chances as being very high that you've never given a child the gift of a very large cardboard box.
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.
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.
I remember being incredulous at the low price. My dad: "Wait until you see what they charge for 'B', kiddo."
“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.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/06/obituaries/Stanley-Moser-...
Thanks.
For 27 volumes, that works out to $1228.50. Your dad wasn't that cheap. :-)
I had some well-written reports in grade school that were graded pretty harshly until the teacher figured out what year they were published.
I eventually returned to F&W indirectly after we acquired a copy of Encarta on CD-ROM along with our first PC.
What was its reputation?
https://www.etymonline.com
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.
https://www.oed.com/
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.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/
https://unabridged.merriam-webster.com/
https://www.ahdictionary.com/
Hope that helps!
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.
> ...
> 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.
> U.S.S.R. stands for the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the official name of Russia. See Russia.
For Russia, https://archive.org/details/worldbookencyclo0016unse_f8g2/pa...
I don't see much optimism, but I didn't read it closely. There is a lot of "it sucks to live in Russia."
https://www.worldbook.com/worldbookencyclopedia2023
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 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.
Not odd. If they're anything like my family, they would have bought it hoping it would help you escape the same fate.
> Younger but very similar. Read A to S. I started T and went to college.
The animal kingdom has long suffered from overfamiliarity with aardvarks and the existential denial of zebras ;)
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.
For example, "Feminism" is "effeminate nature in men; also: women's movement".
It's a fascinating view into not so long ago.
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.
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.