Revised Edition of World Encyclopedia To Be Published

The newly revised edition of Heibonsha's World Encyclopedia, which has undergone major revision, will go on sale in September. With online references having become mainstream, the World Encyclopedia remains the only printed version of an encyclopedia. However, there is clearly a demand among libraries, and Heibonsha has continued to revise and publish segments each year.
The present revision is the biggest in ten years with meticulous attention paid to changes both inside and outside Japan over the last several years, including name changes in cities, towns and villages due to incorporations, name changes in ministries, semi-governmental corporations, public corporations, public enterprises, and consolidated public corporations due to political reform, statute revisions of corporate laws, and the most recent information on foreign place names and data from national censuses.
Illustrations and indexes have also been expanded and color page illustrations included in each section, with the goal of making the World Encyclopedia a pleasure to look at. The index has been fully revised, with a reverse index function for all sections. A comprehensive review of expressions and notations has also been carried out, with a special review of references to ethnic groups and possible discriminatory expressions.
The overall number of volumes has been reduced from 35 to 34 because items traditionally found in the supplementary volume (almanac) have been included under sections in the main volumes. There are approximately 90,000 sections and 25,000 headings, with 450,000 items listed in the general index. The price for the entire work has been set at 270,000 yen.
The company will begin the sales campaign with public and private school libraries, its main customers to date, and then focus on corporations and businesses. They will also enlist the cooperation of bookstores and push out-of-store sales. In addition to a sales promotion in which readers can receive a 10,000 yen bookstore coupon for the purchase of an old edition, Heibonsha is also absorbing the promotional costs for bookstores. Toshihisa Fujishiro, section manager in the Operations Department, notes that "even if the use of computers continues to spread, there remains a deep rooted desire among readers to want to look something up in a traditional dictionary. Because we were carrying out an extensive revision after such a long period of time, we elicited customer responses through large numbers of leaflets distributed in bookstores, and were able to get sufficient feedback."

*Some of the book titles are tentative translations.
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