Customer Reviews

Encyclopedia Britannica 2005 DVD Ultimate Reference Suite

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

 

 

I'm using the Mac-Version of Britannica Ult. Reference Suite 2005. I'm using it on my PowerBook with 1.25 GHz and 512 MB Ram.

Benefits: it contains the authoritative content of the Britannica. That's fine. 2 stars for that.

BUT: The app just SUCKS, everything is LAME. The startup, the search features, the tools, EVERYTHING. It's annoying to use it. The Britannica team seems to trust totally on the content, but that's a failure, cause I will not by a product of them again till I read the announcement: "Britannica has rebuilt its Suite from the ground up in Cocoa, with focus on SPEED."

The Atlas has absolutely NO features, it isn't interactive at all, just a collection of images you surf through. You can view the world, each continent and each land, but THAT'S IT. If you click in a province of Italy e.g., you will get to the article. That's boring. I've heard in Encarta you can get much more details, as you can see the main streets of many cities. Here you don't even see whole provinces in detail!

The Britannica "ultimate" reference edition is a slow tool which connects to a text database with a few pics and movies. It is NOT an interactive, useful application.

If it isn't possible to create an application fast AND convenient, then I would prefer a snappy, sleek little Tool to fly through the articles, really fast and not bloated. That's more important than any features. Actually the built-in features like mindmapper and notices are so ugly and lame, that I won't ever use them.

Fine content, but the app makes it very hard to reach.

I buy every year Britannica and Encarta. Your can read my opinion in Encarta 2005.
The system requirements they recommend in www.eb.com and in the box of the product are very cheap, but the reality is different.
Britannica 2004 was slow, but 2005 is exasperating. I made a full installation (4.1 GB, 510 videos) and then tried installing only the Application (550 MB) and the Articles (only 390 MB), but it's the same. It's not a problem of quantity of contents: Encarta 2005 takes 3.2 GB and responds immediately. It's a problem of the application. I've bought a new and more powerful PC and I'll tell you how it goes. One pro for Britannica: it's compatible with MAC (Encarta isn't).
About the content I can't say very much for the moment. They have added 510 videos but, still, it is not a multimedia product due to, in part, the limited options you have to search (Encarta has a lot). Its AUTHORITATIVE TEXT is still authoritative, but some of their authoritative contributors died years ago, and updating does not work with Britannica (Encarta is updated every week free till October 2005 with new articles and additions to the old ones).One example: Encarta's articles for George Bush and John Kerry are updated till August 18. Kerry has 12 sections, 2 photos, internet links, related articles... George Bush has more. Britannica does not have entry for Kerry (mentions him twice when it was only a Senator) and Bush has utterly less information (perhaps more authoritative... I'm not an expert). Britannica's large articles of printed edition have been shortened, and others modified (for good or bad). They make comparison in the box with Encarta and World Book and claim that they have "More than 100.000 articles!" They confuse articles with sections and windows, windows and more windows that open slowly but inexorably. In Encarta one article is one article, good or bad, and you can scroll very fast or open in any moment the Index and go immediately to any section. Encarta 2005 includes "Encarta Kids" with an interface very colorful and appealing. Britannica has "3 encyclopedias in one": Britannica, Student and Elementary. The interface is the same for all. If you're not interested in Student and Elementary, you can buy Britannica Deluxe. But I've heard it goes very slow too!
All this said, I think Britannica is a marvelous encyclopedia. I have the printed edition (32 volumes, 32.000 pages) and I buy every year "Britannica Book of the Year". Why don't make an "only text" electronic edition like the first one in 1995? Its performance was excellent even in those old computers.

This is my third version of Britannica. It is a definite improvement in content but a disaster in performance. Not only does it require returning to an obsolete version of Java runtime, it conflicts with my antivirus. Save yourself the time and trouble of returning it.

The Encarta Encyclopedia - and even more so, the Encarta Reference Library Premium 2005 - is an impressive reference library. It caters effectively (and, at $70, cheaply) to the educational needs of everyone in the family, from children as young as 7 or 8 years old to adults who seek concise answers to their queries. It is fun-filled, interactive, colorful, replete with tens of thousands of images, video clips, and audio snippets.

The Encarta is extremely user-friendly, with its search bar and novel Visual Browser. It comes equipped with a dictionary, thesaurus, chart maker, searchable index of quotations, games, and an Encarta Kids interface. Installation is easy. The Encarta is augmented by weekly or bi-weekly updates and the feature-rich online MSN Encarta Premium with its Homework Help offerings.

The Encyclopedia Britannica (established in 1768) sports Student and Elementary versions of its venerable flagship product - but it is far better geared to tackle the information needs of adults and, even more so, professionals. Its 100,000 articles are long and deep, supported by impressive bibliographies, and written by the best scholars in their respective fields.

The Britannica, too, come bundled with an atlas (less detailed than the Encarta's), dictionary, thesaurus, classic articles from previous editions, an Interactive Timeline, a Research Organizer, and a Knowledge Navigator (a Brain Stormer). It is as user-friendly as the Encarta. The Britannica, though, is updated only 2-4 times a year, a serious drawback, only partially compensated for by 3 months of free access to the its unequalled powerhouse online Web site.

It seems that the Britannica and the Encarta cater to different market segments and that the Britannica provides more in-depth coverage of its topics while the Encarta is a more complete, PC-orientated reference experience. The market positioning of the Britannica's Elementary and Student Encyclopedias is, therefore, problematic. Encarta has an all-pervasive hold on and ubiquitous penetration of the child-to-young adult markets.

Both encyclopedias offer an embarrassment of riches. Users of both find the wealth and breadth of information daunting and data mining is fast becoming an art form. Encarta introduced the Visual (Virtual) Browser and Britannica incorporated the Brain Stormer to cope with this predicament. But few know how to deploy them effectively.

Encarta actively encourages fun-filled browsing and Britannica fully supports serious research. These preferences are reflected in the design of the two products. The Encarta is a riot of colors, sidebars, videos, audio clips, photos, embedded links, literature, Web resources, and quizzes. It is a product of the age of mass communication, a desktop extension of television and the Internet.

The Britannica is a sober assemblage of first-rate texts, up to date bibliographies, and minimal multimedia. It is a desktop university library: thorough, well-researched, comprehensive, trustworthy.

Indeed, the Encarta and the Britannica offer competing models for interacting with the Internet. Both provide content updates - the Encarta weekly or bi-weekly and the Britannica 2-4 times a year. Both offer additional and timely content and revisions on dedicated Web sites. But the Encarta conditions some of its functions - notably its research tools and updates - on registration with its Plus Club. The Britannica doesn't.

The Encarta incorporates numerous third-party texts and visuals (including dozens of Discovery Channel videos, hundreds of newspaper articles, and a plethora of Scientific American features). The Encarta's multimedia offerings are also impressive with thousands of video and audio clips, maps, tables, and animations. The Britannica provides considerably more text - though it has noticeably enhanced it non-textual content over the year (the 1994-7 editions had nothing or very little but text).

Both reference products would do well to integrate with new desktop search tools from Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and others. A seamless experience is in the cards. Users must and will be able to ferret content from all over - their desktop, their encyclopedias, and the Web - using a single, intuitive interface.

The new Encarta Search Bar, which was integrated into the product this past year, enables users to search any part of the Encarta application (encyclopedia, dictionary, thesaurus, etc) without having the application open. Definitely a step in the right direction.

Having used both products extensively in the last few months, I found myself entertaining some minor gripes:

The Encarta offers 3-D tours which gobble up computer resources and are essentially non-interactive a limited. Is it worth the investment and the risk to the stability and performance of the user's computer?

The editorial process is not transparent. It is not clear how both products cope with contemporary and recent developments, minority-sensitive issues, and controversial topics (such as abortion and gay rights).

The Encarta tries to cater to the needs of challenged users, such as the visually-impaired - but is still far from doing a good job of it. The Britannica doesn't even bother.

The atlas, dictionary, and thesaurus incorporated in both products are surprisingly outdated. Why not use a more current - and dynamically updated - offering? What about dictionaries for specialty terms (medical or computer glossaries, for instance)? The Encarta's New English Dictionary dropped a glossary of computer terms it used to include back in 2001. All's the pity.

Both encyclopedias consume (not to say) hog computer resource far in excess of the official specifications. This makes them less suitable for installation on older PCs and on many laptops. Despite the hype, relatively few users possess DVD drives (but those who do find, in both products, the entire encyclopedia available on one DVD).

But that's it. Don't think twice. Run to the closest retail outlet (or surf the relevant Web sites) and purchase both products now. Combined, these reference suites offer the best value for money around and significantly enhance you access to knowledge and wisdom accumulated over centuries all over the world. Sam Vaknin, author of "Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited"

I love my print version of Britiannica but the DVD Ultimate reference was a big disappointment. The user interface is terrible, with the article itself occupying only a small window surrounded by variouss navigation controls. It is hard to quickly scan or read a large article without frequent clicking and scrolling.
The main problem is its slowness- Why is it that google can search the internet in 0.1 seconds while Britannica on a Mac 1.33GHz G4 takes ages (actually about 20s) to load and 5-10s to search for and view an article ?
I hope that the PC implementation works better, but I fear that the great work of many authors has been let down by very poor software implentation.

Last year I bought the EB 2004 CD-ROM. It was so pathetically slow and buggy on my fast Mac, that I sent it back under their 30 day guarantee. Tech support confirmed my bugs and said no fix was forthcoming. I was sent a promo email to obtain this version, which I did. It is even slower than 2004. As far as I can tell, the whole thing is written in Java and launches in a modified browser. It acts, feels and looks like a hastily written Java application. When running, the rest of my G4 system grinds to an absolute halt. I am sure the content is authoritative (I used to own the print set of EB), but the path to it is so painful, I don't really care. I even opted to install the whole thing on my system so it didn't require the DVD, but it makes no difference. The install routine itself is full of typos. And - a nice touch for Mac users - the program automatically takes you to the download page of an updated application called The Brain(stormer) which is part of the DVD. It's a Windoze only program. I'm not sure whether this whole thing is funny or tragic.

I'm an experimented software engineer.

When I started this "thing" I was amazed how they were able to do it so slow!

I then imagined that the managers of the software engineers have no software background and probably dictated to the skilled developer how to do their job. So I then went to see the "about box" in the software where normally we see the information about the "technical team". The list starts with the name of the President and vice president etc... That mean a lot!

Some newbie in the computer field may thing that because the software have lot of content it should be more slow. They is no correlation. It's like saying that reading a book in a library is more demanding than reading in a park.

Britannica online can just be faster even if normally a software installed on a desktop computer is supposed to be faster than browsing on the web.

The other annoying thing is that all images are stamped with an "EB INC" not far from the middle.

Encarta is definitevely more usable. I will be using Britannica only in the rare case where Encarta didn't provide me enough information.

Historically, the Encyclopedia Britannica was the best of all the print encyclopedias, offering long articles written by experts in their respective fields on subjects of interest to educated adult readers. When digital technology came along offering the potential to transfer that vast amount of information to CDs and DVDs, the hope was that the Britannica would first move over its print articles (which do not take up much space on a disk), keep them updated, and supplement them with useful maps and illustrations.

This has not happened. Not all of the print articles were transferred, updating has been sporadic if not non-existent, and the maps and illustrations are generally useless. Instead of building on its reputation for excellence, Britannica has elected to follow Microsoft's lead, providing multimedia entertainment for morons. Unfortunately, it's not even entertaining.

It still has the best content of all the commercial encyclopedias (wikipedia is significantly better, if more uneven), but that is faint praise indeed. With the advent of modern search engines, allowing the reader to piece together information from a variety of sources, one wonders how much longer Britannica can last.

I am a Mac user. I use Encyclopedia Britannica 2004 and World Book. I also use Encarta on my PC box as a back up. I rely on these three software to do a lot of my college homeworks. As a dedicated Mac user, unfortunely I have to say Encarta is the best. World map from Encarta is top notch. You can rotate the globe, zoom in and zoom out. Let say I am doing a research paper on a town named Mecca. Not only Encarta list the article part and useful links, but also showing where is it in the map. When you click on the map, the map becomes fully interactive so that I can zoom out several steps to find out where exactly in the globe is this town located. Again it's that same globe that is rotatible at any direction by click, hold and drag. It utilizes fully the 3D engine to render the globe on the fly. The maps on both World Book and Encyclopedia Britannica are very dull and not very detail. They are pure 2D images and they are small. Encyclopedia Britannica 2004 is very slow. It seems like the programmers are using Java to write it and port it to both PC and Mac. This method saves time and cost in writing for both platforms but sacrifice performance. Where as World Book is written from the ground up just for Mac (the same goes with PC). World Book is the fastest because of its native OS coding (the same goes with Encarta on PC). But World Book's contents are the less of the three. Many contents are not found. After hearing everyone here said how slower the Encyclopedia Britannica 2005 is, I decide not to upgrade. I gave three stars for the last version because it contains more articles than World Book. And two stars less for OK maps and slow performance. Slowness is the biggest drawback for this software. (Note: My Photoshop 7.0 launches 4 times faster than Encyclopedia Britannica 2004 on my 1.4GHz PowerMac)

I have Pentium 4 2.4 Ghz PC with 256k memory and Win XP. Though I've loaded the Suite onto my hard drive, it's very slow to start up and slow to bring up articles and media. The Atlas really only serves as a SLOW visual index to articles in the encyclopedia since it only has country level maps and some links don't work. The media ranges from quite nice to outdated stuff they must have dug out of the broom closet. On the other hand, being Britannica, the content of the encyclopedia is good and the separate interfaces for adults, teens, and children has potential - if only they could speed it up! The rebates make this a product I'll keep, but rarely use - I could drive to the library and still get my answers from the Encyclopedia Britannica - maybe quicker.