Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2853 in Software
• Brand: Britannica
• Published on: 2003-09-01
• Released on: 2003-09-12
• Platforms: Mac, Windows
• Subtitled in: English
• Dimensions: .53 pounds

Over £300 off Britannica Products including:
Encyclopaedia Britannica Print Set Suite, includes the famous Encyclopaedia Britannica 32 volume Print Set - 2003 Printing, Britannica 2004 Deluxe CD and one year subscription to Britannica Online.  Full Price £1055, Britannica owners price £895 - save £160!
Encyclopaedia Britannica Great Books of the Western World, 60 volume set.  Full Price £599, Britannica owners price £499 - save £100
  Encyclopaedia Britannica First Edition Replica, 3 volume set.  Full Price £99, Britannica owners price £84 - save £15!
My First Britannica - NEW 13 volume set for young children aged 7-10 years.  Full Price £179, Britannica owners price £149 - save £30!
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia, One volume A-Z reference book.  Full price £49.99, Britannica owners price £39.99 - save £10!

Manufacturer's Description
Owning the Encyclopædia Britannica Ultimate Reference Suite is like having a complete reference library right at your fingertips. Its contents would easily fill a large bookcase – and now you can have this vast trove of information on your personal computer. With three complete encyclopedias, two dictionaries and thesauruses, rich multimedia, three complete atlases and timelines, online magazines, and more, the Ultimate Reference Suite is the knowledge you need from the world’s most trusted source.

Encyclopædia Britannica UPDATED! Access the world’s most authoritative information in these 75,000 articles, containing the entire 32-volume Britannica and more. Britannica Student Encyclopedia UPDATED! Find information easily in 16,000 entries that are tailored to school subjects. Britannica Elementary Encyclopedia UPDATED! Instill a look-it-up habit that will stay with young children in school and in life.

Year in Review NEW! Explore notable events in 8,000 articles covering science, politics, sports, and more from 1993 - 2002.

Two Complete Dictionaries and Thesauruses from Merriam-Webster. Together, Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate and Student Dictionaries and Thesauruses provide access to 800,000 definitions, synonyms, and antonyms with a click of the mouse.

World Atlas UPDATED! Take a tour of the world through more than 2,775 maps linked to articles about countries, economies, cultures, and national statistics.

Timelines UPDATED! Watch history unfold with timelines that show the people, events, and discoveries of the past.

KnowledgeNavigator BRITANNICA EXCLUSIVE! Discover new ideas and different perspectives with this interactive tool. Britannica Classics NEW! Read articles from Britannica’s most famous contributors—from Sigmund Freud to Harry Houdini, Marie Curie to Orville Wright. Research Organiser Manage research with tools for note taking, saving bookmarks and pictures, and formatting reports.

Rich Multimedia UPDATED! View vivid illustrations with 21,000 images, video, and audio that bring topics to life. Additional Videos, Web Links, and Magazines Online. Link to 167,000 sites you can trust—selected by Britannica editors—plus thousands of learning games, videos and magazines for a wealth of additional information.

Free Updates Included free for one year! Get new and updated articles on a quarterly basis, keeping your encyclopedia current. (Registration required).

Customer Reviews

Encarta UK vs. Britannica - a second opinion
I would like to disagree with the reviewer of 19th June 2004 who concluded that "Encarta UK is excellent in all aspects but Britannica's text (USA focused) makes interesting to buy both".

Having bought both - based on the previous reviewers comments - I find that I cannot recommend Encarta UK and can recommend Encyclopedia Britannica. Encarta is the encyclopedia that is in fact more USA focused, as it has more U.S. content and provides much less real information for other countries. Britannica, which doesn't have a "UK edition" but a good encyclopedia should not need country-specific editions, was published in Scotland for its first nine editions (120 years) then jointly London and New York until the 1940s. How an encyclopedia that has spent more years of its life being written in the UK, and is littered with articles that make continual comparisons with Scotland or the United Kingdom, can be called "USA-focused" eludes me.

Britannica is a vast store of information, its articles are long and authoritative, and navigation through those articles is very easy. Britannica's choice of font is superb, as it really enhances the sense that you're leafing through a book that contains hundreds of years of accumulated knowledge. On the other hand, while it might be slightly easier to find information in Encarta, the articles are strewn with distractions (default font size too big, sentences double-spaced, photos that can bear little resemblance to the information you're reading) and there is no navigation at all within an article. Compare, for example, the articles on the history of the United Kingdom. Encarta presents this as a few sections covering rough highlights of some key events on one long page that you must scroll through. Britannica organises the information into sections on many pages and includes every major historical event that has ever occurred, with plenty of navigation tools for moving around the article and reading related material, with many tables and graphs of statistical data (missing from Encarta). Encarta rarely identifies the source of their information, Britannica always names the author of the article (and they are always a specialist in the subject).

The only benefit I can find with Encarta is their selection of maps, and their navigation system for the maps. But I wouldn't buy Encarta just for the maps (if you want real maps, they're not detailed enough). The installation of Encarta forced me to install IE6, and required a reboot as a result, neither of which I wanted (and is a typical Microsoft strategy).

Britannica does have a sluggish interface, but this might not be surprising due to the huge amount of information which it is making available to you (vastly bigger than Encarta). Britannica doesn't have so many pictures or videos, but the use of these in Encarta is distracting and rarely "on subject". It looks like Encarta has just had pictures thrown in to help market the product by claiming it "has more pictures".

In conclusion, Encarta is a glossy magazine, not an encyclopedia. If you want an encyclopedia, a source of knowledge, there is only one choice - Encylopedia Britannica.

Excellent PC-based encyclopaedia
Having painstakingly read through all the reviews that I could find, both of the Britannica and Encarta encyclopedias, I finally settled on this one. I am very pleased that I did.

I was looking for a functional, PC-based encyclopedia that would link to the Internet and provide suitable (and safe) access to my young daughter. I was pleased that the Ultimate reference suite came with everything I needed for my wife and I, and the kids, in segregated databases within the same software. The links to the Internet work well, the user interface is as easy to use as anything else I've seen and the content is remarkable.

I have two minor grumbles. The first is that all the media clips lean toward being American. When I say "American", I mean that all the sound and video clips are voiced in American - the content of the database itself certainly could not be described as American, as I have read in reviews elsewhere. In fact, I have been able to extract lots of data relating to medieval life in England, one of the reasons I bought the product. The second small grumble is that the multi-media content could be improved - considering the content and the technological platform it requires, I would like to see some more spectacular visuals than simple video clips, colour diagrams and sound. I want CGI animation! Perhaps a future version will fulfil this?

In summary, this is a terrific purchase at a great price. The content, which let's face it, is why most of buy an encyclopeadia, is superb. There are good offers available for registering the product, too.

BRITANNICA (only USA edition) versus ENCARTA UK
I have bought both Encarta and Britannica for years (EB in printed edition too: 32 volumes, 32.000 pages). This is my opinion in brief: Encarta UK is excellent in all aspects, but Britannica's authoritative text (USA focused and sometimes outdated) makes interesting to buy both.
TEXT: Britannica is a superb encyclopedia of text (not in visual aid) since 1768 (you know: an article by Einstein and so on...). Since 1901 is published in USA (University of Chicago) and is VERY USA FOCUSED. Unlike Encarta, EB has not a UK edition. Contents in electronic version differs from printed encyclopedia (very large articles have been shortened). Britannica claims that it has more entries that Encarta, but this is a joke: articles like "Mexico" are only one (with a lot of subdivisions) in Encarta, while in Britannica subdivisions are unconnected, and you must "jump" from one subdivision to another, which is slow and very annoying, especially if you want to copy it in "WORD". Very often, the text is not updated. Britannica Ultimate Reference Suite has "3 encyclopedias in one: Elementary, Student and Adult".
On the other hand, Encarta's UK text (Premium Suite) is not bad at all. Most articles have the name of their contributors and their professions, works...: They are not "John Doe". You can find large fragments of literary works, literature guides, a lot of sidebars and thousands of quotations. "Encarta Africana" is included only in USA version. The Pop-Up (double clicking a word) Dictionary and Thesaurus has sound for correct pronunciation only in USA edition (by the way, it can read aloud, with a robotic and ugly voice, a whole article). The "Translation Dictionaries" to Spanish, French, German and Italian must be improved, because they are minimal. It gives you a lot of "Internet links", even if you are not connected. With Britannica you must be "on-line" and it searches in an EB Web page.
In theory you can update Britannica over the Internet free for a year quarterly (4 times), but this does not work. Encarta can be updated free EVERY MONTH (USA version every week) with new articles and additions or corrections to the old ones (until October 2004). With Encarta updating really works. Technologically is amazing to see the changes in old items.
ATLAS Britannica has not a real atlas; only a worlds map whose maximum detail are the States of USA. Statistics are very poor. Encarta's Atlas is like another encyclopedia, with a great detail (1 cm = 4 km all over the world) and 20 varieties of atlas presentations (statistical ones can be counted by dozens). If you look at a geographical article (city, river...) you can see in a corner where it is placed and, with only a click, open the Atlas. In articles of cities, if you are on-line, you can see in another corner the weather of this place in that moment.
MULTIMEDIA: They say that "serious" or "adult" readers do not care about "pictures"; that multimedia is only for kids. I do not agree, because I think that, sometimes, "A picture is worth a thousand words". Works of art, anatomy, historical maps, diagrams... Encarta devastates Britannica with a lot of photos, paintings, drawings, charts & tables, animations, interactivities, videos, music and sounds, pictures, 2-D and 3-D virtual tours, 360-degrees views, timeline, games... It is not only the quantity and quality. It is the easy access you have to all the multimedia, and that text and multimedia are fully integrated. Britannica is not really multimedia. It has photos and videos, but they make the program slow and sluggish. They should edit an alternative version with only text, as they did with the first edition in 1995. It performed fast and easy in old computers.
INTERFACE AND PERFORMANCE: This is the worst side of Britannica. With Encarta you only have to type a word or the beginning of a word to see all the articles and multimedia that contain it. If Encarta does not find anything, it gives you automatically alternative spellings. Even if you write the name of a small village lost in any country, you see it in the atlas. If you need to copy text or pictures, the integration with Microsoft WORD is perfect. The "Research Organizer" is very helpful too. Encarta's TEXT FONT is very clear (Britannica's...) and you can choose 3 sizes.
Navigating with Britannica is disappointing. I will only give you an example: if you do not know the exact and correct spelling of a name or word, it does not help you with similar spellings (unless you open a window and "battle" with it). As I said before, the program's performance speed is very slow and sluggish, and it must be dramatically improved. To go "back and forward" you do not find any icon and you need to open a "menu".... One "pro" for Britannica: they say it works with Macintosh.
INTERNATIONAL EDITIONS: Encarta has a lot in different languages. The four I utilize (United Kingdom, Spanish, French and Italian ones) are adaptations of USA version, which is inexorable talking about History, Geography, Literature and other topics. The MISERABLE thing is that articles that equally concern any human being (Health, Mathematics and the rest of Sciences) are a VERY RESUMED translation of USA edition that is, of course, the best of all. Why Microsoft follows such a policy?
I repeat my modest piece of advice: Encarta is excellent in all aspects, but Britannica's authoritative text (sometimes outdated) make interesting to buy both.