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(Finebros) In this episode, you will not be reacting to a video.
Then what am I reacting to?
(Finebros) Instead, it's going to be this.
(thud)
Oh, golly.
Books! More books.
Are these, like, almanacs?
- (loud thuds) - Oh god.
Uh...
There's a lot of these.
Are these encyclopedias?
(loud thuds)
How many are there? (laughs)
How many volumes are there? Holy-- yes!
You're not gonna be able to see me.
Oh my god.
I don't gotta read all these, do I?
- (Finebros chuckles) - 'Cause this is gonna be a long episode.
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(Finebros) So what are those books?
I have a lot of World Books.
They're World Books. It says right here.
(Finebros) Which means what?
They're atlases.
Encyclopedias?
They're encyclopedias.
Multi-volume encyclopedia.
Can I look at them?
Yup, boring already.
- (Finebros) These are encyclopedias. - Oh.
I've seen these in my mom's office.
She has books on books.
I'm like, "You don't even use these."
Ancient areas of our library,
they have dusty books that look exactly like this.
(Finebros) Okay, so what is an encyclopedia?
It tells you about stuff.
It's like a dictionary for different stuff.
A collection of books of knowledge.
It's the Internet in books.
It was Google way back in the day.
It was the worst of times. (laughs)
(Finebros) You could look up almost anything in these books
and they were used as a source for things like research papers.
What are the types of things you use today to do research?
The Internet, Google.
Google.
Wikipedia!
The Internet saves my life whenever I have to write a paper.
(Finebros) So have you ever used an encyclopedia before?
No, nope, no.
Back in elementary school.
Kindergarten, we would use it to look up stuff about plants?
Second grade, but that was an assignment. We had to use one.
I think you could use it as sources,
but it was like one source was the Internet
and the rest was books.
(Finebros) So we're going to have you research something right now.
(dryly) Oh joy.
I did not sign up for homework, guys.
Are you gonna tell me which book it's in?
There's so many though.
Which one-- how will I know which one to use?
(Finebros) Okay, so go ahead and find the chapter on reading.
Read a chapter on reading, okay.
So, uh...
I don't-- do I just-- oh, reading.
- Oh! "R". - (Finebros chuckles)
First, I'm gonna find R.
All right, I'm gonna go to R.
This one's about astronauts in the world, I think,
so I'm not gonna look in this one.
I don't think. Hold on.
Wait, this one's C-CH. Will I find my name, Chelsea?
Wait, they're going by letters.
Okay, wait! Okay.
Where is R in the alphabet?
Um...
There's so many. Oh god.
(straining)
So here's the Q-R.
This is Q-R, right?
So that might have reading in it.
Let's see if they have a back index thing.
No, they do not.
You just have to go about it on your own.
R... A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P.
We've got "radar"-- oh, R-A.
Oh, wait, never mind.
I forgot how to spell "reading".
It's R-E-A.
(pages flip loudly)
Dang it. This is so, so much.
Come on. It takes forever.
This is annoying.
This is why I don't use these.
R-E-A... oh, I'm getting close!
Here's "Romania".
Reading! Ah-ha.
Ah, reading! I found it.
(singsong) Reading.
Oh, I turned right to it.
"Reading is the act of getting meaning from printed or written words."
"How we read," "kinds of reading," "the teaching of reading."
What do you want to know about reading?
(Finebros) Now let's test the encyclopedia.
Come up with anything that you can think of
and see if you can find it in the books.
Okay, let's try unicorns.
Where are the U's?
(sighs) Oh god. I would hate my life.
Unicorn! They have it.
Are there people in the encyclopedias?
Let's look up Tycho Brahe.
Tycho Brahe was an astronomer who was most famous
for having his nose cut off in a battle
and it was replaced with a metal nose.
- (Finebros) I really hope he's in there. - I would love that.
Here's "braiding". There's "Bracks".
He should be somewhere in here.
Brahe, Tycho!
Ehhh!
- (Finebros) What're you gonna look up? - YouTube.
U... it's not here.
- (Finebros) What year does it say? - Oh, 2005.
Right, YouTube didn't start until 2005.
The encyclopedias you have in front of you
are 2005 editions, meaning anything that new happened
or history or findings don't exist in those encyclopedias.
Yeah, true.
That's crazy.
That's what bugs me about books.
You can't update 'em.
(Finebros) Can you imagine relying just on these books
for information compared to the information
- that's at your fingertips today? - Solely, no.
If I needed to, I could pull one of these out and look for something.
In theory, I could.
I would hate it. I would hate it. I would hate it.
Now you can just be like, "Control + F"
and just find what you need.
Probably not.
You can just type stuff and it's so much faster when you press Enter
and then, bam, all these links are already up for you.
Five whole minutes of my life is gone
when I could've found it in .000098 seconds with Google.
(Finebros) Are there any benefits to a physical encyclopedia
compared to the Internet or Wikipedia?
I'm pretty sure there is, but no.
I personally don't trust the Internet.
I don't think it's a foolproof system.
Wikipedia's a free encyclopedia, so anyone can put information
on there, whether it's true or false.
This stuff has been proven.
It's in here because it's true.
Sometimes your Wi-Fi is slow or you got no Wi-Fi,
so you gotta go old-school.
You gotta go to books.
(Finebros) Do you know the names of any brands of encyclopedias?
No.
Uh, no.
World Book? (laughs)
It just came to me.
Isn't Britannica one?
Oh! Encyclopedia Britannica.
(Finebros) The most famous encyclopedia, arguably,
is the Encyclopedia Britannica.
- Have you ever heard of that? - No.
Never heard of that.
Never even heard of it.
Yes!
They have a website online
that you can look stuff up on.
(Finebros) Well, they began making Encyclopedia Britannica
- in 1768. - Ooh, that's so long ago.
No way. Holy [bleep].
(Finebros) So how much do you think a set of encyclopedia
- goes for in the modern times? - $150.
(rejection buzzer)
Really expensive, like $200?
(rejection buzzer)
$250.
(rejection buzzer)
$1,000?
(rejection buzzer)
I'd say, like, $1.00 a book.
(rejection buzzer)
(Finebros) Well, in the 1980s, sets would be from $1,500
- to over $2,000. - Oh my god!
That's too much.
And you have to keep buying them and updating them.
That's expensive.
(Finebros) Well, when you think about it,
it was access to knowledge right away
at a time when the technology hadn't caught up yet,
- so was it worth it? - Back then, yeah.
No. It's money that could've gone somewhere else.
I value knowledge very highly,
but I do think that's a bit steep.
I think it's really cool that you just have all this knowledge
in front of you, but how often are you gonna utilize it?
(Finebros) Some companies still make them,
but Encyclopedia Britannica stopped making physical books in 2010
- and they only exist online now. - Really?
Oh, that makes me really sad.
I think that's so weird how something so big and so great
all of a sudden just vanished.
(Finebros) And so, finally, you're one of the last generations
to still have certain things not be fully digital.
Books, more than likely, are gonna go the way of vinyl records
or other media that has gone fully digital.
What do you think about a future where some teenagers
might never have read from an actual book?
Whoa-ho-ho! That's-- That is thought-provoking right there.
That's so weird to think about.
(groans)
Yeah! I like books being digital and I want them to go away.
I don't want to see the books go.
I love books.
I, honestly, my eyes are watering up.
That makes me cry.
There's something about physically turning the pages
and being able to smell the book and feel the book
that definitely is not upheld within the digital world.
I guess we're so accustomed to the things that we have now
that it's weird to see them go away.
The things that we have grown up with
are starting to disappear.
It's like, "Whoa! What's happening?"
Yeah, that's mind-blowing.
Thanks for watching this episode of Teens React.
Let us know in the comments what we should react to next.
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Hit it before it becomes obsolete and you have to do it with your brain.
Boo! Bye!
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