No, there are no advertisements inside the World Book Encyclopedia.
There is, however, an entry for "Advertising." And it took me most of Saturday to read.
First, it's about nine pages long - by far the longest entry I'd encountered since starting the A volume. In itself, this wouldn't have been a huge problem; John Adams and John Quincy Adams each got somewhere around six pages.
But it was nine pages about advertising. A thing I have always disliked and have worked in long enough to loathe.
Because I know so much about it, the "advertising" entry - written for much younger and less knowledgeable readers - was grating. From my perspective, it skips over the most vital information about advertising today: How increasingly invasive, personalized, and manipulative it is.
I totally understand why the World Book sticks to the basics, like what ads are and how they get made. But ugh. This was the first entry I genuinely did not enjoy reading.
Fortunately, today I read the 30ish pages that comprise the entry on "Africa" and enjoyed them very much. I'm looking forward to reading the entries for each of the African countries.
(TIL that there is more human genetic diversity in the people living in sub-saharan Africa than anywhere else in the world. Which really made me question how folks here tend to talk about "Africa" like it is a single unified place with a single unified people - a place and people we in the Enlightened White West (gagging noises) can easily dismiss. Racism is like bedbugs; it gets in everything and it's so hard to eradicate when it does.)