History of the Encyclopædia Britannica the criteria by which the articles were sorted were not obvious even to scholars, despite Dr. Adler's claims that the sorting followed naturally from the "Propædia's" outline of all knowledge. In 1985, the "Britannica" responded to reader requests by restoring the index as a two-volume set. The number of topics indexed by the "Britannica" has fluctuated from 500,000 (1985, the same as in 1954) to 400,000 (1989,1991) to 700,000 in the current 2007 print version. Presumably, this recent increase reflects the introduction of efficient electronic indexing, since the size of the encyclopedia has remained nearly constant at approximately 40 million
Encyclopædia Britannica Britannica" is aimed at children ages six to 12, and the "Britannica Discovery Library" is for children aged three to six (issued 1974 to 1991). There have been and are several abridged "Britannica" encyclopaedias. The single-volume "Britannica Concise Encyclopædia" has 28,000 short articles condensing the larger 32-volume "Britannica"; there are authorized translations in languages such as Chinese and Vietnamese. "Compton's by Britannica", first published in 2007, incorporating the former "Compton's Encyclopedia", is aimed at 10- to 17-year-olds and consists of 26 volumes and 11,000 pages. Since 1938, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. has published annually a "Book of the Year" covering the