Encyclopedia Britannica 2005 DVD Ultimate Reference Suite

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"

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 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.

Nearly all articles are still better written than those of Encarta. Some are not up to date though.Here's my theory about the awful interface / software design that so amny people have complained about: I think the Britannica team deliberately makes year after year a bad interface in order to keep as many customers as possible to buy the $1300 print version. Since the publishing of CDROM (fall of sales of the print version) and the beginning of strong competition (encarta, etc...), they must have been very reluctant to publish their encyclopedia on CDROM at such a low price (though at the beginning, they managed to charge their cdrom at around $600 if i remember properly the price i paid at that time, around 1998).This year's interface (britannica 2005) is no exception: slow (this year it's 256mb of memory recommended...wow...) and browsing / search functions to its most basic, extremely poor indeed.And as usual the "propedia" of the print version is not included, which would help so much to browse and find appropriate articles.What's best to do then?Complain to them won't help (since all the years they must have been receiving so many complains by now but they don't care, this is classic corporation, money strategy first (= print version)), morals later.Therefore, I'll keep my 2002 version (or keep your 2003 / 2004) as there isn't any notable change with 2005 (only 3% of content updated I estimate)and i bought the latest encarta 2005 (and the next ones when it'll be out) as supplement, especially for update information and the good atlas.No more spending on britannica for now this until they eventually decide to develop good software.I was lucky enough to have been able to preview of the 2005 britannica version (hence the result in this review) from a collegue who've bought it without second thought (which she does regret).