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| Encyclopædia Britannica Deluxe CD2000,
CD ROM |
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| Media,
Graham Bower,
20 January 1999 |
Rating: F2
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Do you remember Encyclopedia salesmen? They used to trudge from door to door trying to sell 20+ volume encyclopedia to unsuspecting families. You don't see them any more though, do you? Since the advent of the world wide web, families wanting to give their kids a head start in school have been buying PCs, not dusty old reference books.
The powers that be at Britannica were slow to recognise the threat that the web posed to them. As their share price slumped, they fussed and fretted and failed to develop an internet strategy.
Finally, last October, they launched a fantastic website - britannica.com. With all of the text of the big set of books, and links to websites selected by Britannica researchers, Britannica.com became so popular that their servers couldn't handle the traffic and crashed.
So where does that leave the Britannica Deluxe CD Rom? Good question. For over £60, it doesn't seem to offer much more than what's already freely available on the web. The most valuable feature "Ask Britannica" produces the same results as the free web service. In fact, the web service is better, offering additional pictures and links.
Irritatingly, Britannica Deluxe CD2000 uses three seperate CDs. The first insists on installing 100MBs of who-knows-what on your hard drive, and once installed, you'll keep having to swap between the second and third CD.
In an effort to add extra value, other multimedia features have been added, which look rather like a cheap, Flash-enhanced websites. The most useful added extra is Analyst, which enables you to access a fair-sized databased of statistics. Compass, the mapping feature, looks ridiculous when compared to other packages like AutoRoute and Route 66. Most frustratingly, little effort has been made to integrate the different features, so a search in Ask Britannica for information on the human skeleton will fail to point your to the multimedia-enhanced Spotlights feature on the human body.
There's genuine value to this CD for people who don't have web access, but if your PC isn't connected to the internet and you have £50 to spare, you're better off spending it on a modem than on this.
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