e.encyclopedia science

This encyclopedia contains about 236 articles in eight sections: Matter and Materials, Forces and Energy, Electricity and Magnetism, Space, Earth, Plants, Animals and Human Body, aimed at 8 to 14 year-olds. The distinctive feature is a dedicated website with links to other websites giving more information about the subject matter of any chosen article when a specified keyword is entered. The website is said to have been created in collaboration with Google. Some links are excellent, some uninspiring, some slow to load without broadband, some broken.

The DK standard of visual elegance is maintained in the book. However, the density of mistakes seems higher than that in other widely-ranging DK books (this reviewer is competent only in the first four sections). Most awful combined factual and conceptual mistake: ‘The Moon has a mass roughly one-sixth that of the Earth, so its gravity is one-sixth as strong.’ In the spread on the Universe, dark matter and dark energy are hopelessly mixed up. A failure to explain isotopes explicitly leads to some unnecessary tangles. There are many errors which could be avoided with a simple caveat. Perhaps the website links will help avoid confusion, but readers ought not to have to depend on this.