Customer Reviews

Britannica Concise Encyclopedia

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(0)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

Good (print) encyclopedias are hard to find these days. The Britannica is one of the best. Excellent articles, no wasted words, a fine buy at the price. I sent one to my daughter after she admired mine. I rate it a 10 out of 10

This "Britannica Concise Encyclopedia" is really concise although it is still very thick (about 2100 pages, and 2 columns/page). It contains large information about many broad subjects such as Arts, Business, Computers, Geography, History, Literature, Medicine, Philosophy, Politics, Pop Culture, Science, and Sports. However, it does not have much specific natural sciences: Mathematics, Chemistry or Physics (nevertheless, computer and science are there). In short, this is a good one-volume encyclopedia.

excellent value; easy to understand explanations; i will buy this again when it undergoes another revision.
the illustrations are very good--including the color rendition.
excellent reference to have on hand for the home-schooler!

I'm enjoying this reference so much.
Lot's of maps which I love and enough
about so many things that just whets
my appetite to go learn more. Also,
of course, a easy quick-reference when
I hear a name or place or whatever that
I've never heard of or just want to
see a little more about.

... then you'll find this book indispensible. I had a 30 volume Britannica set from three decades ago and found I was mostly using the Micropedia part. I got rid of the set, but then missed looking up information you can't get from a dictionary. This single volume is a dream come true.

Seems like a great deal--the Britannica Concise version for $7.99? Well, the file is nearly 140 Megabytes and will not fit on your Kindle drive unless it's practically empty. I downloaded and transferred via USB to my 2 Gigabyte SD card. It does have a Table of Contents but it has only one entry for the entire encyclopedia, so everything you want to look up has to be done using Search (which would be reasonable for an encyclopedia). After leaving the Kindle run for several hours to create the Search index I had no luck. I consulted Kindle Support via email and was told that it would take over eight hours to index the file for searching. I left my Kindle on (with AC adapter) for over twenty hours (just to make sure) and it still wasn't searchable so I deleted it from the SD card. Too bad. It would have made a great portable reference tool.