World Book EncyclopediaInc. Staff World Book
World Book Encyclopedia
by Inc. Staff World Book · first published 1917
8recommended by
37HN commenters
42mentions
2010–2026first – last mentioned
22% recommend76% neutral3% critical
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Oh, man! What a temptation. I grew up in a house that my father filled with books, including the World Book Encyclopedia which I liked but the book resource I treasured the most was a multi-volume OED set he had bought used.
on “Like an Uncut Cake: The enduring appeal of the hard-copy encyclopedia” ↗The World Book Encyclopedia, complete with a two volume dictionary and an annual supplemental volume. I spent much of my childhood and adolescence buried in the many thousands of glossy, fine print pages. And the most awaited day…
on “Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?” ↗> 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.
on “I bought the only physical encyclopedia still in print, and I regret nothing” ↗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…
on “I bought the only physical encyclopedia still in print, and I regret nothing” ↗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…
on “Ask HN: Which book has had the most meaningful contribution in your life?” ↗Ditto! In perhaps 1974 my parents acquired a used recent-edition (1972?) World Book encyclopedia set for my sister and I to leverage in our pre-college studies, and until perhaps 1980 that was by far my most-read (set of) books. I fondly remember the pseudo-topographic colored state maps with their…
on “Ask HN: Which book has had the most meaningful contribution in your life?” ↗Not to go off on a tangent, but I recently invested in a physical copy of the World Book Encyclopedia. It's nice to have a high probability of expertise, if not peer review, behind articles that pertain to facts that tend to change slowly. I learn faster and retain information longer when I receive it…
on “I don't think I can trust Google as my search engine anymore” ↗…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,…
on “A 12-year sequence of telescope images of a star and four planets orbiting” ↗…the right advertisement in front of them at just the right time, and they don't "get" that they haven't looked in a paper copy of the Yellow Pages in years or cracked open any of the 27 volumes of the World Book Encyclopedia on their shelf that they got for their kids 10 years ago. But to spend time and energy hating on something you don't understand, well that isn't really a meaningful use of your time is it? And telling…
on “Startup Stagnation” ↗…have to explain that you're leaving at 5PM so that you can have dinner with your family and that you'll be online later) The dinner table rules were any question was allowed, we owned a used set of the World Book Encyclopedia to answer questions. When driving on the road we encouraged questions about "What do you think that is?" and ways we might be able to guess the purpose of what ever it was we were looking at. Ways to…
on “Ask HN: How to raise a hacker?” ↗…affirmative action even knowing that it will make life tougher for my kids. The way I figure — my wealth has given my kids an unfair advantage over their peers. A poor kid is reading about polar bears in a 1985 World Book encyclopedia while I take my kids to Churchill Manitoba to see them in person. So the wealth based affirmative action will help drive home for them that because the road was smoothed for them, they will he expected…
on “On the destruction of America’s best high school” ↗…in English; § 3.2.2.2 Active Components[2] are listed in Spanish. I'm clearly not the target audience here, but I'd be lying if there wasn't a sense of conceit in its objectivity...kind of like those World Book encyclopedia entries I'd read for hours at a time as a kid, becoming aware of the existence of something, but only enough to sow more questions than answers. [1] https://electroagenda.com/en/a-summary-of-electronics/analog...…
on “A Summary of Electronics” ↗…kind of paradigm shift in the encyclopedia business, just a large company snatching up a small player in a market they were trying to penetrate. Interestingly enough, Encarta has ceased production, while World Book, Encyclopedia Britannica and others are still in business and presumably profitable (for now). Wikipedia was and continues to be a threat to "traditional" encyclpedias, but not because they didn't anticipate a transition…
on “Time To Get Out Of The Bubble And Design For The Average User” ↗Where would you get a printed encyclopedia that's current? The only encyclopedia that I've heard of that's still actively being published is World Book Encyclopedia and that's meant for grade school children. Even the Encyclopedia Britannica released its final edition in 2010.
on “The Books of College Libraries Are Turning into Wallpaper” ↗…questions and curiosity. As a family we have had two activities that have really bound us together, one is my wife's insistence that we always had dinner together, and camping. We also had a used copy of the World Book encyclopedia in a bookshelf near the dinner table, as a series of the Time-Life books on various topics, as well as various popular desktop references like the Scientific American Science Desk Reference. At dinner…
on “Ask HN: Teaching kids how to think?” ↗