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Comment by card_zero | Hacker News Reader

> I've never looked something up in an encyclopedia

Does that include Wikipedia? I mean, the problem with encyclopedias is that they were small (despite physically taking up entire bookcases). I didn't use them much either, even back in prehistoric times when the internet wasn't invented. They tended to disappoint by giving a crappy, superficial overview of something that was only vaguely similar to the thing you wanted to know about.

But I use wikipedia instead of doing an internet search a lot of the time. Or sometimes archive.org, for things probably in books. Cut out the middleman, go directly to where you know the information is.

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For me, having an encyclopedia at home was a huge help with my studies and even finding out what I wanted to do/be later in life. This was 40+ years ago and I also had or had access to a lot of other books but never found them disappointing at all.

Huh. Maybe you studied one of the things encyclopedias tended to concentrate on? They seemed to like particular sorts of facts. Geography. Astronomy. Chemistry, to some extent. That's how I remember it, anyway. If your yen for knowledge was in tune with what the writers thought mattered, you were in luck. Even then, there were space constraints.

I don't remember their titles (they're at my parents' house), but we have several. Some generic with a few plate drawings. Some illustrated. Some focused on one subject. It was not that you learned something particular, more that you know stuff existed.

I now like the fact that they, as books, are frozen in time. And that their knowledge is well packaged and consistent. Unless you're a researcher, you don't need the latest. And as a child, the clear writings and the great illustrations was key to internalize the knowledge.

Maybe not exactly what you mean with frozen in time but they used to (or maybe still do) publish a new tome every now and then with updated information. I think they are still very useful for children, for example.

I remember them being a big help with History for example. I believe I read most of the encyclopedias I had at home (a couple of them totalling maybe 20 heavy books). Now, when I want to learn about something, say acoustics, I go to the internet, back then I would go to the encyclopedia as a starting point and later to the library for more specific information. That's how it used to be.

I meant physical encyclopedias, I use Wikipedia all the time. Although I reach ~half of those wikipedia articles via a google search query.

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