- 6-disc boxed set captures National Geographic magazine's past 121 years (1888-2009)
- Browse over 1,400 issues, 8,000 articles, and 200,000 photos exactly as they appeared in print
- Zoom, scroll, archive, and print in high resolution as you relive thousands of amazing discoveries
- Advanced DVD interface lets you explore topics, search photos, browse the globe, and virtually wander back in time
- Includes 120-page book High Adventure: The Story of the National Geographic Society
Product Features |
System Requirements
- Platform: Windows 7 / Vista / XP, Mac OS X
- Media: DVD-ROM
- Item Quantity: 1
Frequently Bought Together
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Product Details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images? |
Product Description
Amazon.com
The Complete National Geographic
Browse by issue. View larger.
Includes 120-page book High Adventure: The Story of the National Geographic Society.
Explore Machu Picchu. Unearth the secrets of the Pyramids. Live with species rarely seen.
Rediscover how courageous explorers found the remains of the Titanic. Brave the perils of a journey down the Amazon. Explore little-known secrets of the wild panda. Then, once more, stand at the edge of the Grand Canyon. These adventures and thousands more from National Geographic magazine's past 121 years are waiting in this incredible 6-disc boxed set.
Leaf through electronic pages, search, zoom, scroll, and print at a high-resolution. View larger.
Browse over 1,400 issues, 8,000 articles, and 200,000 photos exactly as they appeared in print. Now updated to include 2009 issues, our definitive collection of every issue of National Geographic magazine invites you to browse, zoom, scroll, archive, and print in high resolution as you relive thousands of amazing discoveries.
From headline-making events masterfully described by experts to thrilling adventures that took you far away...this exquisite collection captures it all. Every issue of National Geographic magazine has been digitally reproduced in stunning high resolution so you can read articles as they first appeared, even back in 1888.
Trivia challenges with topic-specific questions. View larger.
Take your collection of National Geographic magazines further with the power and ease of digitized information and images. The advanced DVD interface lets you explore topics, search for photographs, browse the globe, and virtually wander back in time. Never before have National Geographic's one-of-a-kind photography and award-winning writing been so captivating.
Engaging articles. View larger.
Beautiful images at high-resolution, capturing the clarity and quality of the original publications. View larger.
The Complete Collection: 1888-2009
121 years of articles, photographs, maps, and even advertisements as they appeared in print.
Hundreds of Classic Maps
Our most popular maps have been scanned and digitized for easy searching, zooming, and printing.
Easy to Use
Installs quickly! View, print, and download for easy access anywhere, anytime.
Powerful Visual Search Tool
Backed by the power of Bing Maps, GeoBrowse uses the Internet to let you search nearly 5,000 worldwide locations for articles, photographs, and maps featured in our complete 121-yearold archive.
Track the Evolution of a Subject
Research and insights are documented through the years by National Geographic's writers and photographers.
Enhanced Features:
- Improved user interface for improved viewing of images and articles
- Advanced search functionality featuring Microsoft Bing technology
- Ability to copy DVD-Roms to local computer drives for access anytime
- Built-in online content upgrades to allow users to keep the archive current
Product Description
Explore the rich treasury of original
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
203 of 214 people found the following review helpful
Format:DVD-ROM|Amazon Verified Purchase
Unlike the Encyclopaedia Britannica Ultimate Reference Suite, which is a collection of articles from the encyclopedia in a different format, the National Geographic Society wisely elected to scan every page of every issue of their flagship magazine, spanning the period from from 1888 to 2008. To be clear, that's every single page from cover 1 to cover 4 of every published issue, some 121 years' worth of The National Geographic. You can opt to install just the essentials and then swap DVDs as required, or install all six of them to your hard drive. I chose the latter option.
Everything begins with the installation of Adobe's AIR run-time engine. According to the vendor, "The Adobe® AIR® 2.5 runtime enables developers to use HTML, JavaScript, Adobe Flash® Professional software, and ActionScript® to build web applications that run as standalone client applications without the constraints of a browser." Essentially, that means that NationalGeo on your PC has the visual punch of a graphically stunning Website. The installation hiccuped just after I installed AIR from the first DVD. Knowing that Adobe products are a bit finicky, I simply uninstalled AIR, and then downloaded and installed the latest version directly from Adobe's site -- after which I rebooted my PC, always an important step with Adobe products. Then I just re-started the NationalGeo install. Everything worked perfectly after that. Installation took just short of ten hours on a fast PC, and occupies just under 50 GB of hard drive real estate. Whew!
Imagine a bookcase with 10 shelves, each 12 feet wide, packed with the dead-tree version of the National Geographic: that's the amount of information this product stores on your PC. The presentation recreates the feel of holding a printed National Geographic in your hands, so you'll definitely need a 22- or 23-inch monitor to read the smaller type without squinting -- or resort to the built-in magnifier. The UI is clean and modern, but don't expect a conventional WinApp sporting CUA dating from the 1980s. Put to torch are the familiar title bar, menu bar and tool bar. What you get is akin to a sleek Website whose design isn't wholly intuitive: some menu items are hidden and only reveal themselves on mouse-over, so expect a learning curve unless you were born digital. Don't give this one to grandpa; he won't like it.
Searches are fast and may be confined to sections such as feature articles, departments, years, even advertisements. As with all other applications I've seen for the mass market, search does not support Unixlike regular expressions but in other respects is normally adequate to locate what you're after. Content may be searched by feature articles, departments, map supplements, contributors, illustrations and advertisements. Specification of start and end dates is optional. Search may be expanded to include article text, a feature not usually found in similar products. Results can be saved to a reference list for later access.
Search works well with words contained in titles of articles, headlines of advertisements and captions of graphics, but is spotty at best in full-text mode. Searching for articles about Silicon Valley worked flawlessly -- there were two, it turns out -- but a full-text search for five randomly chosen phrases within one of them worked with only two of the five phrases -- Palo Alto High School and flow cytometer -- but failed to find the other three (digital divide, regional planning, conservative institution), suggesting that the search algorithm depends on an index of some kind, a basis falling short of the standards we subconsciously expect from Web-based search. Google has spoiled us.
Text retrieval is hobbled by National Geographic's otherwise justifiable decision to make every page on your screen an exact replica of the original source material: the product is simply a huge collection of page scans from the magazine, so getting text in ASCII format for inclusion in a document is impossible without resorting the kind of trickery that must be used with PDF documents: capture the section of interest with a utility such as Screen Grabber or FastStone Capture, and then use an OCR utility to convert the resulting image to text. The need for such manipulation is rebarbative.
Another annoyance is the product's incessant querying of my floppy drive at two-minute intervals. Clack, grunt ... clack, grunt ... clack, grunt. Why does it want to communicate with an electronic dinosaur? The reason is inexplicable; floppy disks aren't part of the installation and have no conceivable use by the application. An artifact of Adobe's Air, perhaps? Who can say?
To sum up: aside from these infirmities, without which I would unhesitatingly award the product five stars, NationalGeo on DVD is a treasure well worth having and a bargain to boot. Buy it by all means!
[Edit: Afterword of interest only to those who presently have more than 300,000 files on a single hard drive.] You may well discover that your hard drive needs tweaking to support the staggering amount of data this product stores on it. My C drive held perhaps 350,000 files before the installation. Six months later it ballooned to 500,000+. Some of the increase came from NationalGeo, but the lion's share came from the gradual addition of thousands of high-res JPEGs and FLACs. Performance crept along miserably, so I used one of my favorite utilities, Diskeeper Pro, to increase the size of the MFT to the point where no more than 10 percent of available MFT records were used. This resolved performance issues. Being a software engineer, I was able to analyze and resolve the issue: others may not be as fortunate. You might consider installing this software on a dedicated hard drive to minimize I/O latency unless you are comfortable using high-end disk utilities such as the one I selected. These comments in no way constitute criticism of the product, but simply reflect the reality of processing massive amounts of data through relatively slow I/O channels. At the very least, get yourself a reliable SATA drive for the installation -- I have a preference for Hitachi -- and all should go well, unless you subsequently load the drive with a huge collection of photos and music, which will doubtless have a troubling outcome for you as it did for me.
[Edit as of 2011-11-16] After upgrading my PC to Windows 7 I had to reinstall NationalGeo (just the UI software, not the data which was not on the boot drive -- and should never be, for that matter). The Adobe Air problem returned and was not bypassable this time. After a bit of research I discovered a helpful resource on the Internet [...], which is an updated Internet installer that handles all Air-related problems and swats the floppy-drive bug noted above. Also, NationalGeo now has a free download to fix problems with the April 1953 and February 1992 issues others reviews have noted. All twenty-four 2009-2010 issues are available as a $9.95 download. I elected to buy them and now have everything from 1888 to 2010 inclusive, some 1404 issues in all. Now that's a serious research tool!]
Everything begins with the installation of Adobe's AIR run-time engine. According to the vendor, "The Adobe® AIR® 2.5 runtime enables developers to use HTML, JavaScript, Adobe Flash® Professional software, and ActionScript® to build web applications that run as standalone client applications without the constraints of a browser." Essentially, that means that NationalGeo on your PC has the visual punch of a graphically stunning Website. The installation hiccuped just after I installed AIR from the first DVD. Knowing that Adobe products are a bit finicky, I simply uninstalled AIR, and then downloaded and installed the latest version directly from Adobe's site -- after which I rebooted my PC, always an important step with Adobe products. Then I just re-started the NationalGeo install. Everything worked perfectly after that. Installation took just short of ten hours on a fast PC, and occupies just under 50 GB of hard drive real estate. Whew!
Imagine a bookcase with 10 shelves, each 12 feet wide, packed with the dead-tree version of the National Geographic: that's the amount of information this product stores on your PC. The presentation recreates the feel of holding a printed National Geographic in your hands, so you'll definitely need a 22- or 23-inch monitor to read the smaller type without squinting -- or resort to the built-in magnifier. The UI is clean and modern, but don't expect a conventional WinApp sporting CUA dating from the 1980s. Put to torch are the familiar title bar, menu bar and tool bar. What you get is akin to a sleek Website whose design isn't wholly intuitive: some menu items are hidden and only reveal themselves on mouse-over, so expect a learning curve unless you were born digital. Don't give this one to grandpa; he won't like it.
Searches are fast and may be confined to sections such as feature articles, departments, years, even advertisements. As with all other applications I've seen for the mass market, search does not support Unixlike regular expressions but in other respects is normally adequate to locate what you're after. Content may be searched by feature articles, departments, map supplements, contributors, illustrations and advertisements. Specification of start and end dates is optional. Search may be expanded to include article text, a feature not usually found in similar products. Results can be saved to a reference list for later access.
Search works well with words contained in titles of articles, headlines of advertisements and captions of graphics, but is spotty at best in full-text mode. Searching for articles about Silicon Valley worked flawlessly -- there were two, it turns out -- but a full-text search for five randomly chosen phrases within one of them worked with only two of the five phrases -- Palo Alto High School and flow cytometer -- but failed to find the other three (digital divide, regional planning, conservative institution), suggesting that the search algorithm depends on an index of some kind, a basis falling short of the standards we subconsciously expect from Web-based search. Google has spoiled us.
Text retrieval is hobbled by National Geographic's otherwise justifiable decision to make every page on your screen an exact replica of the original source material: the product is simply a huge collection of page scans from the magazine, so getting text in ASCII format for inclusion in a document is impossible without resorting the kind of trickery that must be used with PDF documents: capture the section of interest with a utility such as Screen Grabber or FastStone Capture, and then use an OCR utility to convert the resulting image to text. The need for such manipulation is rebarbative.
Another annoyance is the product's incessant querying of my floppy drive at two-minute intervals. Clack, grunt ... clack, grunt ... clack, grunt. Why does it want to communicate with an electronic dinosaur? The reason is inexplicable; floppy disks aren't part of the installation and have no conceivable use by the application. An artifact of Adobe's Air, perhaps? Who can say?
To sum up: aside from these infirmities, without which I would unhesitatingly award the product five stars, NationalGeo on DVD is a treasure well worth having and a bargain to boot. Buy it by all means!
[Edit: Afterword of interest only to those who presently have more than 300,000 files on a single hard drive.] You may well discover that your hard drive needs tweaking to support the staggering amount of data this product stores on it. My C drive held perhaps 350,000 files before the installation. Six months later it ballooned to 500,000+. Some of the increase came from NationalGeo, but the lion's share came from the gradual addition of thousands of high-res JPEGs and FLACs. Performance crept along miserably, so I used one of my favorite utilities, Diskeeper Pro, to increase the size of the MFT to the point where no more than 10 percent of available MFT records were used. This resolved performance issues. Being a software engineer, I was able to analyze and resolve the issue: others may not be as fortunate. You might consider installing this software on a dedicated hard drive to minimize I/O latency unless you are comfortable using high-end disk utilities such as the one I selected. These comments in no way constitute criticism of the product, but simply reflect the reality of processing massive amounts of data through relatively slow I/O channels. At the very least, get yourself a reliable SATA drive for the installation -- I have a preference for Hitachi -- and all should go well, unless you subsequently load the drive with a huge collection of photos and music, which will doubtless have a troubling outcome for you as it did for me.
[Edit as of 2011-11-16] After upgrading my PC to Windows 7 I had to reinstall NationalGeo (just the UI software, not the data which was not on the boot drive -- and should never be, for that matter). The Adobe Air problem returned and was not bypassable this time. After a bit of research I discovered a helpful resource on the Internet [...], which is an updated Internet installer that handles all Air-related problems and swats the floppy-drive bug noted above. Also, NationalGeo now has a free download to fix problems with the April 1953 and February 1992 issues others reviews have noted. All twenty-four 2009-2010 issues are available as a $9.95 download. I elected to buy them and now have everything from 1888 to 2010 inclusive, some 1404 issues in all. Now that's a serious research tool!]
37 of 37 people found the following review helpful
By CHunter
Format:DVD-ROM|Amazon Verified Purchase
I've been a lover of National Geographic magazine for decades and wanted an alternative to having so many paper-based magazines. After reading all of the negative reviews I was very hesitant about ordering this product. There were 1 star reviews, horror stories about 6 hours worth of installing time, updating Adobe Air nightmares, etc.
Then, I read a reviewer explain that he didn't know what all the fuss was about. That you don't have to install the whole 60GB data, which is what I didn't want to do. His review explained to just insert the install disc (Disc 1), follow the instructions, you're done. Then only insert the other discs as needed, when directed by the computer, to review the content (not to install the data on your computer). That was the explanation I wanted to hear. I immediately ordered the product.
Installation took about 10 minutes. That 10 minutes also includes opening the packaging, pulling out the contents and picking up the discs to look at them. :-)
My Adobe Air software was already updated. There was a message about Adobe Air during the installation, but only regarding to update automatically when updates become available. I didn't bother to check this box. Adobe Air automatically signals me for updates on my computer anyway. My computer platform: Mac.
I immediately started making myself familiar with the app and reading National Geographic.
Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful!!!
Then, I read a reviewer explain that he didn't know what all the fuss was about. That you don't have to install the whole 60GB data, which is what I didn't want to do. His review explained to just insert the install disc (Disc 1), follow the instructions, you're done. Then only insert the other discs as needed, when directed by the computer, to review the content (not to install the data on your computer). That was the explanation I wanted to hear. I immediately ordered the product.
Installation took about 10 minutes. That 10 minutes also includes opening the packaging, pulling out the contents and picking up the discs to look at them. :-)
My Adobe Air software was already updated. There was a message about Adobe Air during the installation, but only regarding to update automatically when updates become available. I didn't bother to check this box. Adobe Air automatically signals me for updates on my computer anyway. My computer platform: Mac.
I immediately started making myself familiar with the app and reading National Geographic.
Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful!!!
127 of 149 people found the following review helpful
By MW
Format:DVD-ROM
We recently picked up this product for Christmas and are thoroughly disappointed with it.
This appears to be just a JPEG scan of every single page from the various issues, advertisements and all, and no actual "text" (the text of the articles are scanned; they didn't bother using OCR to convert it to ASCII text). The collection spans 6 DVDs only because everything is an image; the low image quality certainly doesn't need 6 DVDs and ASCII text also would not. The scanned text is also why the search feature is completely worthless: there's no text to actually search. Instead, you're simply searching a tiny subset of terms that someone decided were relevant to each article. If you were expecting to be able to do a full-text search over 120 years, as I was, you will be sorely disappointed. With this volume of articles and data, a comprehensive, full-text search feature is an absolute must. That this feature is missing makes this product totally unusable.
Having everything be a low-quality JPEG image also means that you cannot copy and paste any quotes if you are using an article as a reference in a paper.
In short, this is an interesting idea that went horribly wrong during implementation.
This appears to be just a JPEG scan of every single page from the various issues, advertisements and all, and no actual "text" (the text of the articles are scanned; they didn't bother using OCR to convert it to ASCII text). The collection spans 6 DVDs only because everything is an image; the low image quality certainly doesn't need 6 DVDs and ASCII text also would not. The scanned text is also why the search feature is completely worthless: there's no text to actually search. Instead, you're simply searching a tiny subset of terms that someone decided were relevant to each article. If you were expecting to be able to do a full-text search over 120 years, as I was, you will be sorely disappointed. With this volume of articles and data, a comprehensive, full-text search feature is an absolute must. That this feature is missing makes this product totally unusable.
Having everything be a low-quality JPEG image also means that you cannot copy and paste any quotes if you are using an article as a reference in a paper.
In short, this is an interesting idea that went horribly wrong during implementation.
Most Recent Customer Reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
Love it!!!
This is an amazing collection! We are so pleased with it. The usability is exceptional! I would recommend this to anyone who loves Nat Geo
Published 3 days ago by Jane Unger
5.0 out of 5 stars
Very Excelent
I've been a lover of National Geographic magazine for decades and wanted an alternative to having so many paper-based magazines. Read more
Published 27 days ago by Bassil Hashimi
1.0 out of 5 stars
Completely unusable on my Mac
I have a MacBook Pro running OS X 10.8.3. The application is unusable on my machine. At first I thought it was freezing on launch, but after about five minutes of the spinning... Read more
Published 1 month ago by Robert H
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent
Excellent product, just as I expected , I recommend to everyone, not a fake product, it is the original ...
Published 1 month ago by Aldin
5.0 out of 5 stars
Simply Exceptional & Extraordinary
As a 30 + year NG subscriber, I have owned this set since it was first released over three years ago, though only recently unleashed its true potential after finally loading the... Read more
Published 1 month ago by M. Reddy
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great resource
the interface is far superior to the old version we had. The DVD's take up less space than the older CDs
Published 2 months ago by David Smith
1.0 out of 5 stars
National Geographic
This item National Geographic Every isuse since1888
not yet arrived after more then two months !!!
I can't understand it.
not yet arrived after more then two months !!!
I can't understand it.
Published 2 months ago by Torres Queiruga, Andres
3.0 out of 5 stars
Not exactly friendly to use
To be able to make it work the way I wanted it to was to make digital copies on my computer which allowed me to research things without pulling disk out and inserting another one. Read more
Published 3 months ago by Jim Satterfield
5.0 out of 5 stars
GREAT PRODUCT AND FAST SHIPPING.
This was a Xmas gift and was very well received. It was one of the highlights from all the gifts my friend got so I was pleased with the product and the fast service.
Published 3 months ago by Francisco Sener
3.0 out of 5 stars
Buy direct from National Geographic--it's cheaper!
This product is available on the National Geographic web site with the latest updates and an additional DVD that includes 2010 & 2011 for $24.95! Read more
Published 3 months ago by M.Taylor
Look for Similar Items by Category
|
