Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

First off, other reviewers must have gotten an older edition, mine does have an alphabetical index right in front. Absolutely necessary as the color arrangement is impossible to find anything. It's annoying that within each color the names are not alphabetical though. Identification from color and photo alone is also impossible, which I'll talk about. Comparison to Crystal Bibles: I have all the Crystal Bibles (vols 1-3) and I hoped this would be all of these in one, more convenient volume, which would take up less space on my shelf. I was sadly disappointed. "Revised and expanded" clearly means reduced and rewritten. In many cases, the Encyclopedia contains about half the writing and half the information, and in fact, sometimes completely DIFFERENT information from the Bibles. I wouldn't mind if it was additional information, but it seems to sometimes be "new" information but lacking a lot of the information from the Bibles. If you can read the text in my image, with the example of Peridot, you can see how much wasted space and how little writing is actually in each section; however, you can also see it has some of the same information on this particular stone but pared down heavily. Some of the information from the Bible is in the "Beneficial for" section rather than written out. This is a more favorable example where the information is summarized a bit more effectively, and is probably okay if you're just looking for a quicker summary of the crystal properties. However, I'm a completist, and it bugs me not to have some of the details from the Bible edition. I found other sections where the information is completely rewritten and doesn't appear to have any correlation to the Bible information at all. The Encyclopedia also lacks most of the interesting and useful information sections from the beginnings and ends of the Bibles - it has some but not all of them. I wanted the Bibles as one volume, not a watered down version. However since it contains some "new" information I am undecided as to whether I'm sending it back. Note: I did not check every single listing to see if all the stones from the Bibles were listed in the Encyclopedia. Even though I'm a researcher/cataloguer at heart, I'm not going through that tedium. Lastly, despite being arranged by color, this is NOT for identifying stones. The pictures sadly were for the most part not improved from the Bibles - they are terrible examples of the color and sometimes even formation of the stones. Sometimes the color is completely wrong and appearance misleading from what you'll find in real life. I had chalked it up to the Crystal Bibles being fairly old and using older, weirdly-lid images that are often much too dark, and where blue appears green, white appears yellow, etc. But many of the same images were used in the Encyclopedia. They seem to be listed in the right "color section" but the pictures are still awful, even when replaced by a new one for the Encyclopedia; for example the Aventurine picture looks veined and dark blue-green and looks indistinguishable from a piece of Apatite. And I mean, this is a metaphysical book, not a rock-identification book. You're better off just google-image-searching for actual identification; even then, some stones vary a lot, in appearance and esp in what sellers call them, so I'd err on the side of not buying a stone with no identification, or that you're unsure of the identification provided. If you want all the info from the Crystal Bibles, get those. If you want stone identification, get something else. If you want a rather large, floppy book with basic metaphysical info on crystals, this is perfectly good, if you ignore the pictures, but there are better ones. I recommend Cassandra Eason's Crystal Handbook.