Eyewitness World Atlas CD-ROM (win)

Rating:
Summary: Best CD atlas I've seen so far
Review: Please note that this review is for the 1998 version of this atlas.

Although out of print so far this is the best CD-based atlas I've seen, with the possible exception of the one that comes with Encarta. I have the Grolier's, Webster's Millenium, the Oxford, and the World Book Encylopedia atlas too, and it is superior to all of them in terms of the interface, ease of use, flexibility, the quality of the writing, and overall features. The interface is, as with all DK products I've seen, very slick and well done visually. In a CD-based encyclopedia or atlas, the interface can make or break the product, because it doesn't matter how scholarly and well-written the text is if the interface is clunky and hard to use. If it is difficult to use, or if it just has a few quirks or limitations people don't like, people just won't use it and will probably go to another atlas or encyclopedia that may not be as good information-wise but which at least is usable. Here the Webster's atlas really falls down, and the World Book's isn't much better. The Grolier's is better, however, and I found it at least acceptable there. Encarta's is quite well done and allows you multiple ways to access information from the main country screen, which is nice.

So the choice for me comes down to either Encarta or DK's. One thing the Encarta atlas allows you to do is to zoom in or out at about 10 levels of magnification. The DK only allows you one far and two close views. This definitely isn't as nice as the Encarta and is one big selling point there. Also, the Encarta allows you to scroll around to neighboring countries at will, which makes it extremely convenient to explore an entire area and visualize geographical relationships more easily. Amazingly, the World Book, Grolier's, and Webster's won't allow you to do this either unless you zoom out to the world view and then reselect the country you want. This is pretty lame and they should really fix that, as this makes the CD version no different from having the different country maps bound together in a book, which requires that you flip back and forth. The only reason to prefer a CD version, besides space, is whether the potential digital and multimedia capabilities are exploited.

One reason, though, to prefer to DK is the very well written country descriptions. Let's face it, the dull, dry country articles typical of most atlases are mostly suitable for putting you to sleep or doing those boring school assignments where you have to pick a country and write a report on it. The DK's are the closest thing to something a little lively and interesting there and I give them a lot of credit for that. For example, I learned that Uzbekistan has the world's largest operating gold mine and is the fourth largest producer of cotton in the world. Another former Russian country, Tajikistan, is mostly bare mountains and only 6% of the land is suitable for agriculture, but although very poor, it contains 14% of the world's known reserves of uranium, and derives most of its income from that. I also learned that Namibia, in south Africa, has the world's largest uranium mine, and is the second largest producer of lead, and the third largest producer of cadmium, in the world. Also, the Okavango river carries a higher volume of water than all of south Africa's other rivers combined. On the social side, amazingly, the constitution not only gives women equal rights but legalizes positive discrimination in favor of women! Those are just of few of the interesting facts you can glean from these articles.

Another nice feature is that along the left side of the screen there are 17 different categories of information you can select to get info about the country, ranging from People, Resources, Economics, and Political, to Health, Education, Crime, and even Communications and Tourism. This makes it easy to pick the topics you want instead of having to read the whole article. It makes cross-country comparisons very easy as you can use these topics as screens and filters to compare. However, the Encarta's articles are probably a little more scholarly and technical, and often run 15-25 pages each for many countries. The most important country articles, such as those for Japan, China, Russia, Brazil, and the various countries in Europe, and so on, can run to 120 pages or more.

Hope my little comparison guide to atlases helps. Happy altas buying and reading!