World Book - 7.3

- generally geared toward high-schoolers -
WorldBook for Macintosh 2005 Tiger Edition version 9.0.x came with my iBook 1.33GHz G4 with OS 10.4.2 as the OEM OS, two years ago and has been a fairly solid, reasonable mini-encyclopedia resource, right here on my local hard drive. 'Not exactly sure, but I believe the whole thing takes up a little less than 1.3 GB with all free updates. Of course the multi-media features are well beyond a mini-encyclopedia with mini-films and many images, but most text articles are short and seem to be geared toward a high-school reading level. That can be quite useful if you just need a quick idea of a subject. More complex topics are often not included at all, not a part of the data base; such as complex medical subjects, and that has been a disappointment. Entries tend to be sanitized of most controversy, mostly void of criticism of mainstream figures, organizations etc. The multi-media stuff adds a few seconds to launch time, makes it a little top heavy, but not too bad. It's colorful and somewhat interactive and so might grab some interest from a teenager. WorldBook for Macintosh "is what it is" and I'm glad I have it. It's useful.

I got World Book 2004 v8.0 bundled with my iBook in Spring of 2004. Clicked the download link above (http://www.mackiev.com/world_book.html), clicked the Support button at top of that page, and then clicked World Book Encyclopedia link on Support page to get to the following page:

http://www.mackiev.com/support_wb.html

This last page has a links for downloading the Panther update (v8.1) as well as a link for fixing the Update Now error that says 'no Internet connection.' By ignoring the Panther link and clicking on the link for the Update Now fix, I got a form that, on submission, downloaded a tiny (<200K) program that checked the version of World Book on my hard drive and then opened a second web form. Completing that form downloaded a file named wb2004update02.dmg, which resulted in my copy's being upgraded to v8.4.

Once upgraded, I launched v8.4 and clicked Update Now, which started a free 12 month subscription, as well as picking up monthly updates for the past 12 months.

The MacKiev web site explains that the World Book organization gave up supporting their update server, so MacKiev has set up its own. This update points the local World Book application to the new MacKiev server.