The Guinness Book of World Records started 33 years ago as a reference work for settling bar bets.  Should someone want to know who had eaten the most eggs at one sitting, or the name of the oldest goldfish ever, the Guinness Book was the place to turn.  In three decades, it has become a record in itself: the second biggest selling book on the planet.  (Number one is the Bible, and it's not impossible to imagine a day when those tables turn.)  So it is not surprising that Grolier Electronic Publishing leapt at the chance to create the 1994 Guinness Multimedia Disc of World Records.

	Whenever a reference book is "adapted" in this way, the most important question you can ask is, "Is this an improvement over the original text?"  This was certainly what I wanted to know about the Guinness Disc.  Would I be just as well, or better, off thumbing through the Guinness Book that came with the package?

	All you Guinness fans may be surprised to hear that the Disc is considerably better than the Book has ever been.  This is mostly because the Book has never been as good as it could have been.  Given its immense sales figures, you'd think Bantam would have upped the production values by now, but the '94 edition is still all black and white and printed on the same old cheap newsprint.

	The Disc contains every bit of information that the Book does, and thankfully doesn't stop there.  (It would have been a crying shame if it had.)  It not only features a lot more pictures than the Book (a total of 850), they are almost all in color!  Really nice color!   On top of this, you are also treated to a goodly number of Quick Time movies.  No longer do you have to be satisfied with a black and white picture of Don Cooke's famous beard of bees.  You can see them buzz around with almost painful clarity.  

	The Guinness Book is almost never used as a real reference book, in the sense that you go to look up something particular and then put it back.  The paperback always gets dogeared because you can't help but browse.  This is one of the strongest suits of this disc:  it's a browser's dream.  You can either use the random record explorer, and have a different caption and picture shown to you every 3 seconds, or you can check out the superlative index.  It's full of all your favorite adjectives:  biggest, most, fastest, smelliest, and more.  Surf to your heart's content.

	If you are actually trying to find something related to a particular topic, you can do subject scans in much greater detail than you ever could with the limited index in the Book, and you don't get newsprint ink all over your fingers in the process.  What a concept!

	If the Guinness Disc is actually going to be an annual event, like its namesake Book, it is definitely something to celebrate.  It is more compact, more accessible, more durable, more entertaining and just plain has more.  A lot more.  The only thing lacking is the portability of the paperback, and you get a copy of that in the package anyway, so what's to complain about?