Encyclopedia Britannica now available for the iPhone

It's amazing how far things have come. Raise your hand if you remember when encyclopedia salesmen used to go door to door, selling you a shelf of books for hundreds of dollars. Now you can have the Encyclopedia Britannica in the palm or your hand for $25. The Britannica Concise Encyclopedia 2010 has over 25,000 entries covering art, history, geography, politics, technology, science, sports, pop culture, and other subjects. It also has over 800 images and maps. And if you shake your iPhone, it brings up a random article. And by the way, the company still publishes the 32-volume encyclopedia.

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Jim Karpen

I have a Ph.D. in literature and writing, and a love of gizmos. I work part-time for iPhone Life magazine and really enjoy the people I work with, my iPad, and Apple's visionary products. It feels like a revolution. My Ph.D. dissertation, completed long ago, focused on the revolutionary consequences of digital technologies and anticipated some of the things we're seeing today.

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Comments

Jim, Your fearless leader

Submitted by Hal Goldstein on 3/29/10 3:12pm

Jim,

Your fearless leader was once an Encyclopedia Britannica salesperson! I followed up on leads in Chicago in the summer of 1971 and made their canned presentation. I learned a great deal about sales (and only a little about Britannica)!

The company sent me a code, and I can't wait to try it.

Wow, who would have thought

Submitted by Jim Karpen on 3/30/10 9:25am

Wow, who would have thought it? : )

Jim

I played with the Britannica

Submitted by Hal Goldstein on 3/31/10 7:52am

I played with the Britannica App for a few minutes. First, the good news.

Lots of information in compact form
It loads quickly
Shaking for a random item is fun
It's good for short, bottom line, factually correct info

The bad news

Nothing in depth
The most frustrating thing is that at end of an article inevitable it says something like this "For more information, on Melville, Herman, visit Britannica Mobile." However, even though the internal hyperlinks work for related items in the Concise Britannica, what looks like hyperlinked Melville, Herman
is not live!

With a good connection and if I wasn't worried about 100% correct, I prefer Wikipedia. However, it is nice to have both tools in my arsenal.

Good news. The lack of a live

Submitted by Hal Goldstein on 4/1/10 8:36am

Good news. The lack of a live hyperlink to Britannica Mobile was a bug introduced at the very end. Once the bug is fixed, the product will be much stronger.

Thanks

Submitted by Jim Karpen on 4/1/10 10:09am

Hi, Hal. Thanks for the updates about this app. Glad to hear they're getting that bug fixed. That was certainly a deal killer.

Jim