The Encyclopedia features highly detailed information about characters, planets, technologies and ships of the Star Trek franchise as well as brief episode and film synopses. It is organised alphabetically and is replete with illustrations, many of which are in color in later editions. The Encyclopedia mostly covers material from the Star Trek television series and the Star Trekmotion pictures, which, according to Gene Roddenberry, are the extent of the Star Trek canon. It does include some completely original information. Given that this information is part of an officially licensed publication but not actually included in any Star Trek movie or television episode, its canonicity is disputed. Some entries in the Encyclopedia contain behind-the-scenes information, presented in italicized text. Unlike the , the Encyclopedia makes no detailed speculations about Star Trek technology.
Publication history
The Encyclopedia was inspired by a previous book by the same writing team, The Star Trek Chronology, which had been directly commissioned by Gene Roddenberry as a way of ensuring continuity on Star Trek. Michael Okuda developed a "worksheet" on which to record episode titles, episode production numbers, stardates, and any new ships, characters or technology. Three print editions have been published to date, in both hardcover and paperback: the first edition was published in 1994; the second in 1997. The most recent edition, published in 1999, includes material through the end of ', the fifth season of ', and the movie '—but as a non-collated addendum. The print version was later complemented by a similar electronic version, the Star Trek Omnipedia. The CD-ROM medium allowed the Simon & Schuster publishers to include video clips. It was released for both Windows and Macintosh, which was published by Simon & Schuster Interactive. This was the only version of the encyclopedia not to be published by Pocket Books. Paramount Pictures is the owner of the copyright. In the years since its 1999 publication, the Encyclopedia had become extremely out of date, containing no information from the most recent four Star Trek films, the last two seasons of Star Trek: Voyager, ' and the most recent series, . There had long been no plans to release an updated version of the Encyclopedia, as its usefulness had been superseded in recent years by online, digital resources such as Memory Alpha. During the August 2015 annual Star Trek convention in Las Vegas, an updated version of the Encyclopedia was announced for publication in 2016, the 50th Anniversary of Star Trek. The total pages for this updated version is 1,056 pages. According to a post on StarTrek.com on August 8, 2015, the day it was announced at the Las Vegas convention, the updated version will have "300 new pages" that will cover Star Trek: Voyager Seasons 4–7, Star Trek: Enterprise Seasons 1–4, Star Trek: Nemesis and will contain information regarding J.J. Abrams' Star Trek movie reboot. The version will come as a " two-volume hardcover edition" and will cost US$99. The 2016 revised edition was published by Harper Design on October 18, 2016 for $150. In a 2016 interview with Geek Speak Magazine, Denise Okuda stated that there is "two, maybe three times as much text in the 2016 edition as in the original, and way more than three times as many photos and illustrations."
