The Encyclopædia Britannica (Latin for ‘British Encyclopaedia’) is a general-knowledge English-language encyclopaedia. It has been published since 1768, and after several ownership changes is currently owned by Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. The 2010 version of the 15th edition, which spans 32 volumes and 32,640 pages, was the last printed edition.[1] Since 2016, it has been published exclusively as an online encyclopaedia at the website Britannica.com.
Printed for 245 years, the Britannica was the longest-running in-print encyclopaedia in the English language.
…but the World Book Encyclopedia is still doing printed editions:
The World Book Encyclopedia is an American encyclopedia.[1] World Book was first published in 1917. Since 1925, a new edition of the encyclopedia has been published annually.[1] Although published online in digital form for a number of years, World Book is currently the only American encyclopedia which also still provides a print edition.[2] The encyclopedia is designed to cover major areas of knowledge uniformly, but it shows particular strength in scientific, technical, historical and medical subjects.[3]
World Book, Inc. is based in Chicago, Illinois.[1] According to the company, the latest edition, World Book Encyclopedia 2024, contains more than 14,000 pages distributed along 22 volumes and also contains over 25,000 photographs.[4]
I have to admit that I’ve never bought a print copy of the World Book myself, though I did grow up with one.
Would’ve been nice to link to his source .zip file so we didn’t have to find it for ourselves. Closest I could find on quick first try was 2020-2021 in EPUB & PDF formats.
https://github.com/simonw/cia-world-factbook-2020/ Oh, hey, I saw this a minute ago.
Any idea if this can be turned into a zim file for kiwix easily?
The thing is that it’s a reference work; a major part of the value is that it’s current. Old versions are going to decline in usefulness.
Yeah, definitely. Anyone want to buy a stack of old encyclopedias? It’s a shame that so many useful resources are being removed or destroyed.
Britannica’s print edition bit the dust in 2010:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclopædia_Britannica
…but the World Book Encyclopedia is still doing printed editions:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Book_Encyclopedia
I have to admit that I’ve never bought a print copy of the World Book myself, though I did grow up with one.
Would’ve been nice to link to his source .zip file so we didn’t have to find it for ourselves. Closest I could find on quick first try was 2020-2021 in EPUB & PDF formats.