The New Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2007 Edition

Encyclopaedia Britannica (Other Contributor)

Editorial Reviews

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Encyclopaedia Britannica continues to be an authoritative resource. The 81,000 articles are signed by more than 4,300 contributors and have extensive bibliographies. The latest printing retains the Micropaedia/Macropaedia/Propaedia structure: short articles for quick reference in the Micropaedia, in-depth treatment of broad topics in the Macropaedia, and an "outline of knowledge" in the Propaedia. The articles on non-U.S. countries in the Macropaedia are extensive--India is 175 pages long. Afghanistan is updated through 2004 with information about the new constitution and government formed by Hamid Karzai, making it more current than the Micropaedia entry, which ends with the overthrow of the Taliban. The Micropaedia entry for Yasir Arafat notes his November 2004 death.

The 84 new articles in this printing include Kerry, John; Nanotechnology; Wal-Mart; Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD); and Yo-Yo Ma. New articles on Animal rights, Monkeypox, and SARS update biomedical coverage. Among the 3,900 rewritten or revised articles are African American literature, Great Depression, Mt. Everest, and Vietnam War. More than 120 maps have been added or changed, including those for Chicago, Europe, Iran, Iraq, United Nations Peacekeeping, and Vietnam War. Among the 119 new illustrations are new flag and primate plates.

Encyclopaedia Britannica retains its position as an excellent scholarly reference source for public, academic, and secondary-school libraries, especially since it has improved its coverage of current events and added some articles on popular culture. Barbara Bibel
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Product Description

If you're looking for the most comprehensive encyclopedia, look no further. The "2007 Encyclopaedia Britannica" combines today's current topics with over 238 years of expertise and delivers more depth, breadth, and information than other encyclopedia. Readers can access quick facts or immerse themselves in detailed articles on almost any subject imaginable while enjoying the vivid and beautiful images of art, geography, science, sports, and much more. With over 1,100 new and updated entries, over 4,000 contributors, and 65,000 articles, the "2007 Encyclopaedia Britannica" is unsurpassed. In an age when anyone can post their version of the facts on the Internet, "Encyclopaedia Britannica" maintains its reputation as the most trusted source of the information and ideas people need for work, school, and the sheer joy of discovery. The unique four-part organisation of the traditional 32-volume set makes it the ideal Encyclopedia for every enquiry. The 12 volume "Micropaedia" gives quick and concise answers with a summary of the essential facts and acts as a gateway to Knowledge in Depth. The 17 volume "Macropaedia Knowledge in Depth", gives you complete and thorough understanding in all subjects. The one-volume "Propaedia" is the outline of knowledge, a guide to learning that will help you in pursuing any subject in depth. The two-volume Index is the key to Britannica. More than 720,000 references take you to the exact page you need, quickly and easily. With articles written by experts in their fields, including an extensive list of Nobel Prize-winning authors, "Britannica" has several thousand more entries than its nearest competitor with magnificent photographs, illustrations, maps, charts, and diagrams that bring the text to life.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 32 pages
• Publisher: Encyclopedia Britannica, Incorporated; 2007- 32 Volume set edition (January 3, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1593392362
• ISBN-13: 978-1593392369
• Product Dimensions: 27.2 x 18.5 x 12.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 132.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,686,107 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

33 of 40 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating, October 12, 2004

By	Gavin Wilson - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Britannica First Edition Replica Set (3 vol.) (Britannica Black) (Hardcover)

There's a wonderful episode in series three of Blackadder in which, for reasons I cannot quite remember, Baldric and Blackadder work through the night to recreate Dr Johnson's dictionary. I think they get as 'Aardvark'.

There's a sense of too much effort being invested up-front in this first edition of the Encyclopaedia. The three equally-sized volumes cover A-B, C-L and M-Z. The volumes were written and published a few years apart, and you can imagine the editorial meeting in 1768 when they realised that they had only cover A to B. Would they continue at the same pace, and possibly not live to see a final XYZ volume published? (What would their wives say?!) Or would they rush the rest, and hope that no-one noticed the imbalance?

Well, now we can enjoy the imbalance. A word of warning: you need to get used to the archaic form of the letter 's', which looks like an 'f' except at the end of a word or when in uppercase. Thus we get phrases like 'notwithftanding thefe difadvantages' and conceivably 'fuppofing Pope's Iliad to be fhit'.

The reproduction of the three volumes has been done on a photographic basis, using an aged edition. Thus you'll buying a pristine photocopy of someone's original, as it is now, splodges and all. As others have noted, the binding is not real leather, but this doesn't bother me. Each volume is surprisingly light, given that you're getting around 1,000 pages per book. And that includes a number of fold-out tables.
The content is particularly Scottish, by the way, although there is no harm in that. Thus if you look up 'Law', there's almost nothing on the law of England and Wales, yet the editor appears to have filled countless pages with the full text of every Scottish statute in operation at the time.

As you might expect, this is not the first encyclopaedia to buy if you're looking for something to help your kids through GCSEs. I suspect that, 250 years on, over half the entries are incorrect or at least out of kilter with today's understanding of the world. But it's a fascinating thing to browse through.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars THE ULTIMATE REFERENCE VOLUME, January 22, 2003

By	reviewer (Zurich, Switzerland.) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Encyclopaedia Britannica 2002 Complete 32 Volume Print Set (Encyclopaedia Britannica 2002) (Hardcover)

A complete set of "Encyclopaedia Britannica" provides a near perfect answer to every reference need. Its age-long tradition is synonymous with class and accuracy: a sound testimony that reflects its over two centuries in circulation.
This set of tools is something any versatile researcher would hardly do without. There is no imaginable topic that is not taken care of.
The price of this collection may be above that of a laptop, but with it, you are done: no need for extra (general) reference tool. It remains a precious resource for anyone who can afford it.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A few comments after two months of intensive use, November 14, 2003

By	magellan (Santa Clara, CA) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (COMMUNITY FORUM 04)

This review is from: Encyclopaedia Britannica 2002 Complete 32 Volume Print Set (Encyclopaedia Britannica 2002) (Hardcover)

Please note that this review is for the CD version of the encyclopedia. I couldn't locate the multimedia version on Amazon, which I had written a review on a couple of months ago for some reason, so I thought I'd post the review here. That was a long review that compared the Britannica with the other major offerings with respect to features, such as the World Book, Encarta, and Grolier's, so if you're interested recommend you try to look it up as I go into much more detail on the different sets so you can make the right choice for you.

That was a couple of months agg, and now that I've worked with the Britannica extensively, I wanted to make a few more brief comments. And by intensively I mean that each week I've spent several hours reading the various articles.

First, a minor complaint. The CD version of the program is very slow running and very piggish when it comes to memory. According to my memory monitoring utility, my RAM utilitization goes from 65% availablility to 38% after loading the Britannica, and that's with 512 megs of RAM. It's the only program I run that impacts memory like that. I recently bought a new system with more RAM and now it runs much better. My old system was a nearly 4 year old Pentium III 650 MHz machine with only 128 megs of RAM (which is fine for Windows 98), but not for running XP, which I had upgraded to, especially if you want to run the Britannica program. My new system is a 2.6 GHz Celeron with four times as much memory, and the Britannica, while not blazingly fast, at least isn't dog slow anymore. I'm surprised they didn't do a better job with the speed. Most people will find this program runs somewhat slow on their systems if they're several years old unless they have a lot of RAM.

That having been said, I'm delighted to have this great resource on my system. My interests are mainly in science and history, and 40% of the Britannica is devoted to science. The articles on physics and astronomy and medical and physiological topics are not as technical as I would like, but the other two areas I'm interested in, geology, and linguistics, have articles that are, to use an over-used word phrase, simply awesome. The articles on mineralogy, and on igneous, metamorphic, and sedimentary petrology, and geomorphology, are amazingly technical, and are at least at the upper division undergrad level and could even be master's level in terms of diffulty.

The articles on comparative and structural linguistics are similarly good, especially the ones on the different language families, such as the Romance, Germanic, and so on, as well as on the super-family articles such as Ural-Altaic and Indo-European. These and the geology articles read more like they were written as technical reviews for professionals already working in the field, rather than for your average college student. Lastly, the articles on western and eastern philosophy, especially the classical periods, are very good too.

Also, many of the history and biography articles are quite good, and I've read all the ones on the founding fathers, George Washington, Jefferson, John Adams, Hamilton, Franklin, and so on, and they were excellent as well. As I said, I like to read up and research a number of different subjects, and I read at a fairly high technical level in most of them, and the Britannica has enabled me to increase my knowledge of them substantially and to refresh my memory on many technical details I had forgotten from my advanced classes. So far I've read several dozen articles on various topics and am very pleased.

Well, I've written more than I intended to so I'll sign off here. But I wanted to post a few more comments from a very happy customer.