[HarryT]

Picked up my EB today. A 560 mile round trip, so quite a long drive, but well worth it. It's now filling two shelves of one of the bookcases I emptied by replacing most of my paperbacks with ebooks.

Point well taken about "how useful is a 1998 encyclopaedia", but my main interest is history, which really doesn't change that much. Looked up a few of the subjects I've been researching recently for my Egyptology course and they're very informative.

Why the EB rather than Wiki? Two main answers:

1. It's more authoritative (which isn't necessarily to say more accurate, but I can reference EB in an essay; I can't reference Wiki).

2. It's hugely better as a research tool, because the information is better organised. The EB has a volume called the "Propaedia", which is a hierarchical categorisation of all human knowledge. This allows you to "drill down" and find out what areas it would be useful to research to learn about whatever it is you want to know about. As well as the Propaedia there is a 2-volume index which allows you to find all references to a topic, and a decent index such as this is far more than a simple word search.

Anyway, for £50 I reckon I've got a bargain. The contents of the books are in perfect condition. The bindings are in good shape too, with only a few dinged corners where books have been dropped.

Very happy!

BTW: just won an auction for an 11th/12th edition in reasonable condition for £30 - this time it's local, so I'm going to pick it up tomorrow. The 11th edition is the classic 1910 version; the 12th edition is 3 additional volumes added to the 11th ed in 1920; two covering the "Great War", and a third with miscellaneous changes added between 1910 and 1920.