Pity the poor encyclopedia salesman. Bloomberg Boot Camp, a report on today's technology. Time was... not too many years ago... when salesmen went door to door selling encyclopedia sets to every American family. An investment in the future of your children... .and don't worry about the money. We'll set up a payment plan. Today, all of those volumes fit on shiny little discs that pop into your computer...

"Print encyclopedias have virtually gone out of business due to the popularity of multimedia encyclopedias and of course, the Web, as a source for information."

Sally Katovsich is the product manager for Encarta 2002... the tenth of edition from Microsoft. For under sixty dollars... the Encarta reference suite puts a vast amount of information at your finger tips. Among the new features is a single search function... .

"It allows you to, instead of going to different t products within the reference library... having to go to the atlas to look up atlas information or the encyclopedia or the dictionary or trying to hunt and peck for multimedia... this year, with one search, if I'm looking up information on the United Kingdom for example, all that information including all the relevant Web links all comes to me on one screen."

Another new feature... .allows you to keep the product up to date... all of the time...

"We're going to let you know when there's new content, when the world changes, you're going to get to push a button and that information is automatically going to stream into your copy of Encarta seamlessly."

The updates are free for a year. After that... .you'll have to spring for the next version of the software. Bloomberg Boot Camp, I'm Fred Fishkin.