The World Book Encyclopedia is an American encyclopedia. The encyclopedia is designed to cover major areas of knowledge uniformly, but it shows particular strength in scientific, technical, historical and medical subjects. World Book was first published in 1917. Since 1925, a new edition of the encyclopedia has been published annually.
World Book, Inc. is based in Chicago, Illinois. According to the company, the latest edition, World Book Encyclopedia 2023, contains more than 14,000 pages distributed along 22 volumes and also contains over 25,000 photographs.
World Book also publishes children's non-fiction and picture books under the Bright Connections Media imprint, and educational development and supplemental instructional resources through Incentive Publications by World Book.
History
World Book was founded in Chicago by publishers J. H. Hansen and John Bellow, who realized that existing encyclopedias were off-putting to readers. In 1915, they enlisted the help of Michael Vincent O'Shea, a professor of education at the University of Wisconsin.
The first edition of The World Book Encyclopedia was published (as simply The World Book) in 1917, by the Hanson-Roach-Fowler Company. "As a rule," wrote O'Shea, the founding editor, in the preface of that 1st edition, "encyclopedias are apt to be quite formal and technical. A faithful effort has been made in the World Book to avoid this common defect." The encyclopedia's name would later be shortened to its current name World Book.
In 1919, World Book became the property of W.F. Quarrie & Company. The new owners created an editorial board to help make sure the entries were aligned with what students studied, from kindergarten to high school.
In 1933, World Book exhibited at the Century of Progress Exposition in Chicago.
In 1945, World Book became the property of Field Enterprises.
In 1952, World Book moved its office into the Merchandise Mart in Chicago.
In 1962, World Book published its first edition of Year Book.
In 1963, the World Book Dictionary based on the works of Clarence Barnhart, was published as a companion to the encyclopedia.
In 1977, staff members of World Book visited President Jimmy Carter in the White House.
In 1978, World Book was purchased by Scott Fetzer Company, an Ohio conglomerate that left the encyclopedia company in Chicago. That year, the company had a sales force of 60,000 and vastly outsold Encyclopædia Britannica.
In 1985, the Scott Fetzer Company was purchased by Berkshire Hathaway. In the late 1980s, while the World Book sales force had declined, it still had 45,000 door-to-door representatives. For the year 1990, Berkshire Hathaway reported that the business of producing the encyclopedia had generated profits of $32 million. But as sales plunged in the 1990s, World Book'''s results were no longer broken out in Berkshire Hathaway financial reports.
In 2009, Funk & Wagnalls was acquired by World Book Encyclopedia; the company's Funk & Wagnalls New Encyclopedia had ceased publication in 1997. Starting in the 2000s, the popularity of World Book declined, which caused the company to focus on its digital content and sales to academic institutions alongside children's trade publications.
As of 2022, the only official sales outlet for the World Book Encyclopedia is the company's website; the official list price is $1,199. A company representative said in 2018 that "thousands" of print sets are still ordered annually, mostly by schools who use them as teaching tools for library research skills; public libraries and homeschooling families are also frequent purchasers.
Production
The first edition of World Book (1917) contained eight volumes. New editions have since appeared every year except 1920, 1924, and 1932, with major revisions in 1929 (13 volumes), 1947 (19 volumes), 1960 (20 volumes), 1971 (22 volumes), and 1988 (new typeface and page design, and some 10,000 new editorial features). In 1972, a Research Guide and Index were added to World Book. In 2000, World Book published its Millennium Edition.