"The Anime Encyclopedia, 3rd Revised Edition: A Century of Japanese Animation" will be released March 3.
Editions 1 and 2, published in 2001 and 2006 respectively, have long proved invaluable to English-speaking scholars, fans and writers, serving as reliably exhaustive and often highly entertaining guides to a world that can seem as massive as it does impenetrable. As author Neil Gaiman gushed, the book is "an astonishing work," and in the era before the Internet was awash in anime trivia, it was also an imperative one.
But the Encyclopedia's publishers, California-based Stone Bridge Press, were not only aware of the explosion of anime information online after the last edition, they embraced it. The e-book version of the third edition is peppered with hyperlinks to Internet sites relating to the films, series, directors, authors, studios, genres and terminology highlighted in the text, enabling readers to leap seamlessly between platforms. It also retails for about a quarter or less of the hardcover's cost, and is already available via iTunes and other e-book outlets.