We put the two biggest Encyclopaedia brands on the market head to head. Which one has the bigger brain? Read our Australian review.
Encyclopaedia Salespeople must have it quite easy these days. As little as ten years ago, the figure of the encyclopaedia salesperson could be used as the butt of many fine jokes, struggling under a mass of heavy books door to door. Now all you'd need to sell encyclopaedias would be a pair of cargo pants able to hold a couple of CDs, or a simple briefcase if you were ambitious.
There's essentially one time when people ponder an Encyclopaedia purchase; when their children need a reference tool for educational purposes. As a reference tool, however, there's a very strong challenge to encyclopaedias -- the Net.
After all, why spend the money on a CD/DVD encyclopaedia when a simple Google search will reveal a wealth of detail? The Net can constantly evolve and adapt, while an optical media product is set in stone, right? The set in stone bit is rather easily dealt with; both of the packages we've reviewed here have online update/subscription facilities. Indeed, part of the reason you can pick up an encyclopaedia as cheaply as you can is because the parent companies have realised they can make more money with an annual subscription than a one off expensive purchase.
The other thing that an encyclopaedia purchase should avoid is bias and error. Web articles have no particular authority attached to them, and it's particularly easy for bias and revisionism to creep into articles when an author has a particular axe to grind. An encyclopaedia is also an easy way to present a research tool that's both pornography-free and (in theory) not a time waster, something that the Net can all too easily be.
In assessing these two packages, we looked at two different factors. Clearly, an encyclopaedia should be an all-in almanac of information; we wanted to know what each package contained as an informational package. That's only half of the equation, however. There's no point having the best information to hand if it isn't easy to search and relevant. To that end, we set ourselves a research task across a number of educational disciplines, and checked what each encyclopaedia had on each topic. This isn't just a matter of comparing entries; it also allowed us to assess the ease of searching for information from each package.
We also deliberately chose three topics of an Australian nature to see how well each package deals with local content. Our other two topics were deliberately either general and/or somewhat controversial in order to assess how each package handled our enquiries.
In order, we searched for:
- Sir Sidney Kidman
- Bob Hawke
- Cane Toads
- Franklin Delano Roosevelt
- LSD
Encyclopaedia Britannica 2003 Ultimate Reference Suite
Britannica's got the brand name in print encyclopaedias. Does this expertise transfer well to computer media?
Microsoft Encarta Premium Suite 2003
Microsoft's Encarta Brand isn't as established as Britannica's, but it has the definite edge in searching ability.
16%
7%
