The World Factbook 2000 is now available on the Central Intelligence Agency Web site (http://www.cia.gov). The World Factbook remains the CIA’s most popular and most widely disseminated product, with its home page accessed an average of nearly 380,000 times each month. In addition, the Web version of the Factbook is widely replicated on or linked to from thousands of commercial, academic, and other Web sites.

This reference work provides a snapshot as of January 1, 2000, of wide-ranging, hard-to-locate information about the geography, people, governments, economies, communications, militaries, and more for 267 geographic entities. There are nine primary information categories and 100 subcategories for most entities, including geographic coordinates, GDP, number of telephones, natural resources, legal systems, political parties, illicit drugs, and mortality rates. Included among the 267 geographic listings is one for the "World," which includes data and other information summarized where possible from the other 266 listings.

The World Factbook contains eight appendixes with reference information ranging from abbreviations and descriptions of international organizations and groups to cross-reference lists of Country Data Codes. The 2000 edition includes 19 reference maps which are available in two formats.

There are new information subcategories on Internet Service Providers (ISPs), Telephones–main lines in use, and Telephones--mobile cellular. The Background entry which was introduced in the 1999 edition has now been completed for more than 200 countries. The terms and abbreviations used in the Environment--current issues entry are now explained in the Notes and Definitions section of the prefatory material.

Printed copies of The World Factbook 2000 will be available for purchase next month from the Government Printing Office (http://bookstore.gpo.gov) and the National Technical Information Service (http://www.ntis.gov). Ordering and pricing information for both domestic and international customers will be available on the GPO and NTIS Web sites.

The CIA plans to make The World Factbook files (totaling about 85 megabytes) available for single-file (complete) download for higher-bandwidth users and as a file set for lower-bandwidth users and will announce when these files are available.