I think amazon is one of the best ways to buy, especially no S & H when
you spend a certain amount of money. I save gas by not going to the
store.

Almanac is updated and published annually, sort of a stone age wikipedia that doesn't require web access to use. Lots good stuff.

I get a new one of these every year, it is loaded with so much information that I refer to it all the time. one of the main things I look up is famous people for birth dates and such. very good book

This is one of the few books in my library which gets weekly (sometimes daily) use, and which I feel obligated to replace every few years, in order to have the most updated information. Granted, the historical data does not change, but the usefulness of the book is in finding important *recent* facts or statistics. Highly recommend it!

I buy three or more every year for my husband. One for each room in which he spends any amount of time.

Beware! This book will be addictive once you pick it up. Just when you have lost yourself in an interesting subject,another comes up and there you go again. Great book. Buy it!!!!

This is an awesome desk reference for facts. It's also extremely entertaining to read. You may find yourself addicted if you start flipping through. For the price, this is GREAT!

I buy the new publication every year as a diary of what happened when. I also enjoy the list of entertainers births and deaths. This year I had a really hard time finding it for some reason. Even with shipping costs, this purchase was cheaper than the one I did find at the mall.

I gave this to my dad for his birthday, he likes all the data in it.

I like to order a World Almanac every year. It is a very useful quick reference for all sorts of things. Interesting to browse through also.

This is the type of reference that everyone should have. It contains up-to-date information about almost everything one could imagine! I was sent my order of the newest version almost immediately.

I have bought this book it seems for the last 20 years or more. I get it as one of my gifts every Christmas. Just so much information is in here. I even found a lot of information on astronomy and the planets. Every topic I ever wanted to search for is in here. I love the history of all the presidents, crime stats, lots of facts on every country in the world, populations, and even how old famous people are. You can read it forever. You can learn a lot from this book.

The world of facts at you fingertip and you don't have to worry about fake facts from the internet.

WORLD ALMANAC 2008,
This book is a MUST for every home. It is chock full of information,which can be invaluable to "Elderly Memories." When a "Senior Moment" comes upon us, we look in the Almanac and the "Moment" disappears. The Almanac is easy to use because the index lists information in categories with subtitles. We especially like the list of celebrities Past & Present.

This book is a must in our house. As we see people on TV and remember them from long ago, we guess their ages - but the Book of Facts decides the winner! We get the newest update each year to make sure we'll have the most current info!! Just one of the many uses we have for this great reference book.

This was a gift for my husband. He loves Almanacs and hadn't had one for awhile. He's a big Jeopardy fan and loves facts and figures. I would recommend this one for a gift.

As with every other World Almanac I've used over the years, this one is without peer, and superior to all others in the depth and breadth of its coverage. If what you're looking for in it isn't there, and it usually is, it will invariably provide you with the means to look elsewhere. Basically, though, it's a great one-stop-source book of knowledge.

This paperback book arrived with a torn cover. Amazon really dropped the ball this year.

The World Almanac and Book of Facts 2008 (World Almanac and Book of Facts)

I am a crossword puzzle fan and find this book to be of great help in finding answers on a variety of subjects.

I got this book for my mother. She loves it; does not have a computer and I am sure never will so she joys having this handy to look up facts.

good delivery service, but the book had an inked out page, not revealed in the description, but the book is good otherwise.

We wouldn't be without the Almanac since "discovering" it several years ago. We've given it to many friends & family and all agree it's the best
quick and easy reference for anything you ever wanted to know. If it's not in the Almanac---it just may not be that important!

I like this almanac best because it has lots of words such as "1982" and "output" and "France."

I've tried a number of almanacs to satisfy my nerdy need for trivial information. This is the best. Buy this one and avoid the terrible one called Information Please.

This book hardly needs a review but for me, it's a must have addition to any library.

A fountain on information - no home should be without one - I have used previous Almanacs dozens, even hundreds of times to answer questions or settle family arguments on many, many subjects that have come up in the course of daily living, family get-togethers, etc.

This book has an amazing amount of facts that are both useful and fun to read. We purchased books for our sons and sons-in-laws, plus one for my wifes brother-in-law. Now I will have to buy one for myself to compete with them. Both little known facts and important facts that are worth reading over and over.

My last almanac was 2004. Bought this one to not get toooo far behind.

I would not be without one because of the wealth of information it

contains. Am quite satisfied with this one.

As a librarian and professional fact-finder, and as a man who has had almanacs and (more recently) statistical abstracts available to him all his life, I have to say that any paper-based almanac is losing relevance with today's market.

I naturally have to commend the almanac for items such as the chronologies of national and world events, conversion tables, universal calendars, and so on, but if a person wants to find out about Nigeria or Venezuela and their relative oil exports, they're more likely to get better information from a source such as en.wikipedia.org. If wikipedia were not footnoted and referenced as carefully as it seems to be, I would not encourage its use - but it is. I really don't know who sits behind the editors' desks at the World Almanac and its competitors.

With apologies to anti-Kindle users who are reading this, we are getting very close to a point where people with the abiliity to access the internet can carry a hand-held device with them and gather facts. At the same time, they'll also be able to do on-the-fly comparisons more easily. To use my prior example, a curious person is about to be able to use a hand-held device to compare the number of barrels of oil exported per person in Nigeria and Venezuela, and then compare that data to each country's per capita income.

The tipping point is approaching. Keep buying almanacs for now, and think about how you use a mapping product instead of an atlas or map - and how quickly you made the transformation.

One of my favorite books since childhood. Back then it was how many cruisers and destroyers each of the nations had? We had an still have statistics on presidential elections, and information about Hollywood. How old are the stars? Too many statistics can get boring, so the editors find new things to tell us. If you think sex statistics are hot, we're beginning to get some. In the 2007 edition, information was given on how many sex partners most people have. The 2008 edition goes even further, to the point of making me laugh, even though I shouldn't. Oh well, I still like statistics.

gotta have an up-to-date almanac in the house ---- despite our habits of going to the computer (which isn't always right), gotta get the right answer from the almanac

This is a nice resource to identify historical information.
It's well worth the price to have it at your fingertips.

"Almanac 2008" begins with a synopsis of 2007's top ten new stories (eg. from Iraq to the Minneapolis bridge collapse), interesting changes of the last several decades (eg. fat consumption/capita in the U.S. increased from 37.7 lbs. in 1910 to 85.5 in 2005; the trade deficit/surplus went from +$92 billion in 1975 to -$817 billion in 2006), a brief news quiz (eg. "Which Republican contender paused during an NRA speech for a call from his wife?"), an election guide, key international issues for 2008 (about the same as 2007), etc. Then its oodles of fact-filled pages to add depth to most any news discussion - except those involving Hollywood stars' latest escapades or notable murders. "Almanac 2008" then ends with short statistical summaries of nations I didn't even know existed.

"The World Almanac" is a great resource. Especially for people who just have to know minutiae such as (I just flipped through pages randomly to get the following): Top 20 reasons people give for visiting the ER (page 135), SAT scores by state (page 403), Hispanic voting power (page 602), names of North American Cardinals (Roman Catholic) (page 715), basic information on countries such as Malta or the Maldives or Mali (page 797), boxing champions by weight class as of October 1, 2007 (page 955).

This volume has a long historical record, going back to the last century (according to the introductory comments, it has been published for 140 years). The introductory section also notes that the FBI worries that the Almanac may provide useful information to terrorists, indicating that a book that many would think stodgy has come to exemplify Post 9/11 America.

There are a set of sections, each dealing with a set of related subjects, from "Economy, Business, & Energy" to "Crime" to "Military Affairs" and so on to the final section, "Sports." In short, there's something for almost everyone here.

The 2008 version does not disappoint, for those who are interested in having a reference such as this. Highly recommended! And, if you're like me, a lot of fun as one randomly peruses the volume to pick up interesting and little know facts.

There are many imitators on the market, some of them quite good, but this almanac has set the standard for more than a century. The New York World newspaper began publishing an almanac in 1868, "a 120-page volume with 12 pages of advertising." The newspaper suspended the almanac's publication in 1876, but publisher Joseph Pulitzer revived it in 1886 as a "compendium of universal knowledge." The almanac has been published annually since, outliving the newspaper whose name it still bears. (The World Almanac is not the oldest almanac in publication, however: that distinction belongs to The Old Farmer's Almanac, which is "North America's oldest continuously published periodical," founded in 1792.)

The World Almanac contains much useful information that belongs in any serious basic-reference set. For the world, the almanac presents basic statistics about each nation, and about the world's major religions; and summarizes the world's history, with more detailed histories of the United States and of the preceding year. For the United States, the almanac reprints the nation's organic documents, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution; lists every community with a population over 5000, with its ZIP code and area code; lists every county (or parish or division) and county seat; presents basic statistics about each state and major city, and a short biography of each president; and much more. The almanac also contains bountiful information about education, science, sports, and many other topics. No other single volume offers such a wealth of information on such a variety of subjects.