how long does it take to read the encyclopedia britannica – Atkins Bookshelf (2024)

FAQs

How long does it take to read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica? ›

The Britannica has a reputation for summarizing knowledge. To further their education, some people have devoted themselves to reading the entire Britannica, taking anywhere from three to 22 years to do so.

A.J. Jacobs was not the first to read the entire Britannica. The earliest recorded example was Fath Ali, who upon becoming the Shah of Persia in 1797, was given a gift of the 3rd edition of the Britannica.

The Encyclopedia Britannica contains carefully edited articles on all major topics. It fits the ideal purpose of a reference work as a place to get started, or to refer back to as you read and write. The articles in Britannica are written by expert authors who are both identifiable and credible.

“I was raised by books. Books, and then my parents,” Musk once said in an interview with Rolling Stone. It's reported that he read the entirety of the Encyclopedia Britannica by age 9, and would continue to be engrossed in books for more than 10 hours a day throughout his childhood.

The differentiated instruction and PreK through 12th grade Common Core content-rich, lively material make Britannica School a highly recommended database that is relevant in the digital age.

"The print edition became more difficult to maintain and wasn't the best physical element to deliver the quality of our database and the quality of our editorial," Jorge Cauz, president of Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., told Reuters.

Encyclopædia Britannica also argued that a breakdown of the errors indicated that the mistakes in Wikipedia were more often the inclusion of incorrect facts, while the mistakes in Britannica were "errors of omission", making "Britannica far more accurate than Wikipedia, according to the figures".

The Encyclopædia Britannica was first published in 1768, when it began to appear in Edinburgh, Scotland. Since its founding, the Encyclopædia Britannica has relied upon both outside experts and its own editors with various subject-area proficiencies to write its entries.

Unfortunately the only really collectible Britannica sets are the the 9th and 11th editions. Full sets of the 15th, like yours, are readily available from retail resellers from $150 to $200. These prices closely reflect actual completed sales of these volumes.

Britannica's content is among the most trusted in the world. Every article is written, and continually fact-checked, by our experts. Subscribe to Britannica Premium and unlock our entire database of trusted content today.

What should I do with my 30 year old encyclopedia? ›

Recycling encyclopedias

Call your local library and ask if you may donate your set to be sold. Put it up for giveaway on freecycle.org. If they're really old -- say, more than 100 years -- call a rare bookseller and ask if they're worth anything. Find out if a local recycler takes them.

Britannica's content is among the most trusted in the world.

The book of hours began to appear in the 13th century, containing prayers to be said at the canonical hours in honour of the Virgin Mary. The growing demand for smaller such books for family and individual use created a prayerbook style enormously popular among the wealthy.

It would take, of course, the area of about a million pin- heads because, instead of there being just the 24 volumes of the Encyclopaedia, there are 24 million volumes. The million pinheads can be put in a square of a thousand pins on a side, or an area of about 3 square yards.

Poor Zywiec. For years, this Polish city (population 32,000) has had the distinction of being the final entry in the print edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the last word in the 44-million-word opus.