They're great little books! They're informative, packed with information and pictures, and are very helpful reference works. However, I've barely looked at them since I bought them, because they were published in 2000. Wikipedia started up in 2001.
Thirty years ago, whenever I needed to know something, I would buy a book that contained the information. My reasoning was that if at some future date I needed to know something else, I could well have a book in my collection that told me. However, once all the information was available on the Internet, there seemed little point in continuing this practice.
It's a shame, because those books really are nice little overviews, presenting the established facts in a non-technical manner while not talking down to the reader. They're organised, so you get the bigger picture to contextualise the basic information. They're the kind that you might peruse from a relative's bookshelf while everyone else is engaged in conversation about babies, pets or local gossip. Also, they use British English spelling. Wikipedia put paid to their like.
Nowadays, I don't even need to read Wikipedia. I just ask ChatGPT what foreign embassies were in Marylebone in 1873, it toddles off and tells me none, I ask where the Ottoman Empire's embassy was in 1873, it says Marylebone, I point out the contradiction, then it goes off thinking for a minute and tells me there was a Swedish legation in Marylebone in 1907, but probably not 1873. Source: Wikipedia. Wikipedia's source: some web site in Swedish.
Oh well. Plato wrote a dialogue in which Socrates offers that writing is OK as a reminder, but people ought to rely on their memories. Every forward step has someone who regrets it.