The World Book encyclopedia

What Hacker News says

1. ButlerianJihadOct 2026
   That doesn't matter a single bit, and I'm unsure of the effort of pointing it out to us. By the way, you are only looking at the English Wikipedia, not the whole thing.

   The 12,000 articles in English is a vast amount, albeit many were stubs or rather deficient. But the World Book Encyclopedia covered any topic a college girl could ask for at the time.

   Moreover, the book series is perfectly preserved to this day. In the 1980s it was already aged by 20-30 years, but the formatting, crisp photos, fonts, and all pages and references/index were still intact. I could page through it today and be transported back to the world of 70+ years ago without issues. That's how books work, right?

   https://m.xkcd.com/1683/

   In contrast, English Wikipedia's history (and every other project) is a tangled tech-mess. It's chaos back there. Sure: you can grovel back in "View History" and recover any basic text of an article that your heart desires. But where shall you find a definitive one, a validated one? And moreover, you'll never recover its formatting, the associated images, and the external links have 100% rotted away to useless typosquatters and 404s. All the templates once used are modified, deleted, or broken. Wikimedia's vast Commons doesn't deliberately sync with anything else, so it's up to each language-project to keep track of the images they want to import from the Commons. You're essentially looking at thousands of huge file cabinets full of jumbled papers and media.

   https://what-if.xkcd.com/59/

   In all its touted wiki-glory, Wikipedia being a living library is astoundingly deficient and caught in a literal web of tech debt. Its pages today are geopolitical battlegrounds and fiefdoms of autists all across the spectrum. We can't avoid it; we can't live without it; but can we afford its monopoly on "truth"?

   Now more to the point of this thread and the telescope images. Olden images were photographic plates. Before that, sketches and drawings. We still have Galileo's "moon dots" from Jupiter discovery!! Wow! But as we progressed from piles of photographic plates into digital data, who will process, catalog, and preserve all that data? The new telescopes coming online all represent veritable firehoses for scientists to drink from. How will they organize the torrents so that future generations will not die from thirst?

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2. theandrewbaileyJun 2023
   > Aside from the shark photo and the print error, I am genuinely proud to own a modern World Book Encyclopedia. And I say that freely, having purchased the set out of pocket myself.

   If the author had to buy it with his own money, it's a pretty lame sponsored post.

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3. mcphageJun 2023
   I have tons of memories of reading my parents' World Book Encyclopedia growing up. Honestly, getting a print copy for my kids to browse through doesn't seem a bad idea.
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4. bookofjoeJun 2023
   This got my attention. I recall reading my World Book encyclopedia back when I was a kid in the 1950s for many, many absorbing hours. Tremendous enjoyment.

   I see that Amazon's selling the 2023 edition for $1200 BUT World Book is selling the 2022 edition new for $500 and the 2021 edition new for $400. There are many eBay sellers offering the 2020 edition used for $300.

   This might be the best present EVER for my now 7-year-old grandson who can read but whose parents limit his iPad use to 1 hour/day.

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5. robwwilliamsJun 2023
   Many older generation scholars had the same gut feeling about the 1911 11th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica and claimed, with some justice, that it was the last “truly” comprehensive summary of human knowledge.

   Of course this was due to the mismatch between the maximum practical and economical size of an encyclopedia and the rate of gain of knowledge beginning in the early 20th century.

   When I was 23 years old in 1976 I won a $125 award at Alta Bates Hospital in Berkeley for a faster way to stock the wards. I bought a gorgeous leather-bound gilt-edged copy of the 1911 Britannica for precisely $125 at a huge used bookstore in downtown Oakland—-all 29 volumes, each volume just under 1000 pages.

   That 11th edition has always held a place of honor in our home (well, my significant other does not have quite the same warm feelings as I do since $125 was a bucket-load of money when we were getting started).

   It makes for interesting reading.

   It would be amusing to add the World Book encyclopedia of 2044 to the collection although I doubt my kids or grandkids would be quite as amused as me.

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6. sowbugJun 2023
   When I was seven years old, my mom got ensnared by a door-to-door World Book encyclopedia sales pitch.

   That set, in turn, ensnared me. It was the closest thing in the 1970s to today's internet. I could look up almost any topic that came to mind. I could research any topic we were learning in grade school. When I was bored, I could flip through any volume and learn about whatever subject happened to present itself. I still remember the acetate sheets separating the human body into skeletal, muscular, nervous, and digestive layers. I remember the beautiful drawings of sea creatures. I even remember article typefaces.

   Maybe I'd have figured this out anyway, but those encyclopedia gave me the lifelong habit of assuming that answers were out there, if you had the ability and desire to go find them. They also sparked a love of reading for fun.

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