Customer Reviews

Encyclopedia Britannica 2002 Deluxe Edition

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

Britannica CD 2002 (Deluxe & Standard Edition) is a real disappointment for the advanced user of Britannica CD 98. Let's see why:

1) Find tool has its own window. Therefore you have to make more clicks to choose an article and read it than in the case of Britannica CD 98. Thousands of additional clicks mean A LOT OF EXTRA TIME!

2) It is said that Britannica CD 2002 has more than 80.000 articles. It seems a lot more than 72.000 articles comprised in Britannica CD 98. But the truth is that most of the so called new articles are actually parts of formerly more comprehensive articles!
Example: Britannica CD 98 has 1 article named Slovenia with many sections (chapters), while Britannica CD 2002 has the contents of this article divided into 10 (ten!) articles! Similar story is repeated in the cases of all other states and many other articles (like apterygote, for example).

This is a very easy way to increase the overall number of the articles, isn't it? But it does not seem fair to me.

3) Many corrections that were sent to Britannica's editorial stuff in the previous years haven't been taken into consideration. Mistakes from Britannica CD 98 are published in Britannica CD 2002, too (e.g. wrong spelling Pisarro instead of Pissarro in the two of the articles.)

Therefore my advice is: if you already have an older version of Britannica (in my case it is Britannica CD 98), keep it! It is not worth buying a new one.

It is not easy to make a choice between Britannica and Encarta, but I finally buy this one.First of all, this is the encyclopedia I usually use in school and I always found it is useful. I guess the content will not disappoint me and it is as expected. with over 80,000articles in two cds, the multimedia is the opportunity cost. I think the image is not enough, I read swordfish and it doesn't show me a picture. although the print version has no picture as well, I think it is necessary. there are some minor bugs with the program but it is generally stable. I recommend this product to the serious learners.

Very good on hard subject matter, like science, medicine, mathematics. But it is certainly lacking in soft areas, like history, politics.
The interface is too constricting in its article presentations.
I, too, notice the multiple clicking needed to get thru articles.

Tho history and politics are well-known for their inexactness and historians and politicians are known for their sometimes criminal slantedness, I do think Britannicas researchers should try at least a little harder to present balanced, unslanted historical and political information.

If you are a serious user of reference books and you intend to buy multimedia encyclopedia because of its text content and not multimedia features such as videos and animations, you might be interested in this brief comparison between Encyclopaedia Britannica and Microsoft Encarta (in both cases I've been trying 2002 Standard Edition).

One big Britannica's plus
Articles
Articles in Britannica are usually longer and more precise than articles in Encarta, not to mention the overall number of articles (Britannica beats Encarta, especially its Standard Edition). And finally: there are less mistakes in Britannica than in Encarta.
One of the big blunders (in both encyclopedias!) is a false information that Slovenia, a Central European and Alpine country, lies on the Balkans, though the northern border of this peninsula is (in Encarta only) correctly described as Upper Sava River - Rijeka. Slovenia lies north of the Croatian seaport Rijeka and doesn't belong to the Balkans neither geographically or politically!
Another Britannica's slip is its claim that the Slovenian composer Jacobus Gallus was German-Austrian. If editors of Britannica doesn't believe to me (I've sent them plenty of corrections including this one a few years ago), they should take a look at Merriam Webster's Biographical Dictionary (see my review there!) where Gallus is described correctly.

Some of the Britannica's minuses
Characters display
Encarta displays practically all foreign characters correct (e.g. Slovenian and Czech c, s and z with a circumflex, other Central European characters, Portuguese a and Spanish n with a tilde, French e with a grave accent, etc.) while Britannica doesn't. In Britannica a Croatian writer Senoa (S with a circumflex) is listed in the very beginning of the A-Z list, and a great Slovenian poet Preseren (again s with a circumflex) is almost imposible to find though he's listed in the Britannica A-Z. A fact that Encarta doesn't list those two men of letters at all is another story (see One big Britannica's plus at the beginning of this review).

Interface
Encarta has much more user friendly interface than newer versions of Britannica. In Britannica it's obviously designed for the extinct 14" monitors. Find tool in Britannica has its own window. Therefore you have to make more clicks to choose an article and read it than in the case of Encarta. Thousands of additional clicks mean a lot of extra time.

Multimedia content
It's also a (big) plus for Encarta, but for an adult user of encyclopedias multimedia isn't the most important feature.

My advice
Probably the best decision is to buy both Encarta and Britannica (of course not necessarily the same year; in my opinion Britannica is the one who should wait until its interface is improved - or even reversed to its '98 version). It may be very useful to have two different sources of information - not only for researchers and students.
If you don't mind about multimedia features and if you'll use multimedia encyclopedia as an authoritative source of facts and information only, you'll probably prefer Britannica. But keep in mind that even in Britannica there are some small and big mistakes, and that its interface and character display aren't as user friendly as in Encarta.

PS
I actually gave Britannica 3 stars for its contents and 1-2 stars for its interface.

I always find what I'm looking for in Britannica. I was also pleasantly surprised to find a lot of photos, along with sound & animation.

The information is serious and there's a lot of it. The interface is easy to use and the "extras" (like a dictionary, world atlas, and other features) are a big plus. If you want a real reference tool that isn't written for third graders, Britannica is the only choice.

I was disappointed with the package. They didn't really make an effort to incorporate multimedia like you would expect. I prefer the Encarta deluxe. Encarta deluxe gives me better search results and has the multimedia components one would expect from a computer encyclopedia - and Encarta is slightly more user friendly. In defense of Britannica they have better writers than Encarta in terms of writing style, but the information content is about the same.

Encyclopedia Britannica have failed to take advantage of multimedia. There are only a handful of video references, many of low quality. Monochrome images are all dark for some reason.
The poorly designed interface has some bugs which should have been worked out. I bought the DVD version and one reason was for the world atlas, which is the most disappointing aspect of the package. I have seen better freeware atlases. Detail is extremely poor. Encarta atlas beats this easily. I wish I could say something nice about the application, but I honestly cannot!

Anyone who used the great printed Encyclopedia Britannica of the 1940s to 70s will find this electronic issue a great disappointment. The comprehensive essays and in-depth discussions just are not there. In many cases I found a three-year old one-disk Encarta and a printed twenty-year old World Book more interesting and useful.

My review gives britannica zero stars, in protest, because the item cannot be shipped abroad (Israel in my case).
Should I get paranoid?