We had an old World Book Encyclopedia – possibly ten years out of date – that I thought was one of the most charming things in the world. When I was a kid in elementary school, I used to love looking at the encyclopedia. World Book Encyclopedias were so standard in our school district that it was years before I even heard of the Encyclopedia Britannica or any of the others. I think I loved the way that the articles were laid out. I think that at that age I could not imagine there being more than one such book in existence. These days, I mostly look at the World Book Encyclopedia online. The majority of the entries in the World Book Encyclopedia were only a few pages long, and none of them were much more than ten. It seemed to contain all the information in the whole world.

Whenever I had a question my teacher could not answer, she would tell me to go look it up in the worldbook encyclopedia, and unavoidably the answer was there. It is nice to have all of the extra convenience of being able to surf articles on the Internet. It seemed like, in those few short pages lay all there was to know about a exacting subject. When I did, I was even more fascinated. Whether I was looking up the history of Spain, Snow Owls, or Saturn, there was more than sufficient to get me going on my report. Free online encyclopedias like Wikipedia can be pretty good, but they are not always constantly written. Comparing books on the same topic side by side is hard because they are all different lengths, have dissimilar writing styles, and different information. It is worth it to pay the extra fee for a well written, dependable orientation that will tell you a little bit about just about everything.

Comparing encyclopedia articles, on the other hand, is relatively easy. Even so, sometimes I miss the sheer massiveness and impressiveness of the print World Book Encyclopedia that would take up a whole shelf at school. Typically, they are about the same length and hit most of the alike key points. The differing ways they are written, the extra little details in them, and the angle the particular author takes come through much more strongly. It in fact was fairly a feeling to decant through such a massive source of knowledge.