DISCLAIMER: Not every article, if any, in the Hitchhikers Guide is entirely accurate. This is partly because factual articles are dry and humourless, and mainly because most Field researchers submit their articles after exceptionally long lunch breaks.

See Error Messages.

It should be noted, however, that the Hitchhikers' Guide still contains more truth than any comparable tome. This is because every other book is governed by a strict editorial policy aimed at avoiding legal action from those who might potentially be offended by the content they produce.

The reason that the Guide has such a lax editorial policy is because, most of the time, its editorial staff are out to lunch in the sleaziest, most extravagant, most controversial eateries that money can buy. And the reason that the Hitchhikers' Guide has succeeded in avoiding major litigation is because the people they are treating to lunch are invariably senior members of the judiciary.

That and the fact that another editorial policy is that all lunches are secretly filmed.

A Note on Version Control

There have, in fact, been a number of different editions of the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, of which this is, probably, the latest. For ease of use, and to ensure that you can tell these different versions apart, it is perhaps worth explaining what, where and how they differ.

Guide 1.0

The First Edition looks rather like a largish electronic calculator. It has about a hundred tiny flat press buttons and a screen about four inches square on which any one of a million "pages" can be summoned at a moment's notice.

It looks insanely complicated, and this is one of the reasons why the snug plastic cover it fits into has the words Don't Panic printed on it in large friendly letters.

The Guide is published in the form of a micro sub meson electronic component because if it were printed in normal book form, an interstellar hitchhiker would require several inconveniently large buildings to carry it around in.

It has three settings: Text, Voice, and Composite.

Few first editions exist because the Guide is designed to receive updates to its database via Sub-Etha. Field researchers (like Ford Prefect) can also use the Guide to edit entries and transmit these back to the publisher. Only editions that have either travelled to a point in time and space beyond the upgrade, or that have had their receiver circuits fried, can be described as First Editions.

Note: field researcher editions come with small memory dump modules for the saving and uploading of entries.

Guide 1.1

Revised Editions are identical to the first, except that they aren't.

The software has been upgraded to increase their capacity and functionality. This upgrade affects not just the content of the Guide, but also its appearance. It now resembles a small, thin, flexible lap computer.

Where the first edition had a around a million pages the revised edition has in excess of five million, nine hundred and seventy-five thousand, five hundred and nine. This upgrade also includes three important features:

1.the voice of the book has changed

2.It has added a fourth setting: Holographic

3.In order to ensure that the guide is never separated from its owner, whoever was in possession of the Guide at the time of its software upgrade (or, if it is a rare first-hand copy straight out of the box, its new owner) will have developed a symbiotic link. This means that the Guide will is extremely difficult to lose or otherwise get rid of.

The default hologram is of a Megadodo, a now extinct bird whose image was adopted as the logo for the Guide's publisher, Megadodo Publications. A variety of alternate skins are available is the user wants to personalise his copy.

Guide 2.0

See Media Piracy.

Guide 3.0

Following an attempted product recall that has since been unhappened as a result of media piracy, a reissue of the revised edition has been made available in a variety of colours. This version folds out like a real book and fills the available space on its interior. This sacrifices all the fiddly buttons in exchange for a colourful widescreen format.

Guide 4.0

A limited 'open source' release with no Voice or Composite function, this edition – also called the text edition – was released for streamed Sub-Etha download to any device on any planet. Each edition is therefore tailored to the language and pedagogy of the world it was supplied to (an Earth edition can, for example, be downloaded via the internet or mobile phones).

It should be noted that, for copyright reasons, all Guide entries authored by field researchers with entry codes not prefixed by the three letter acronym ARM, have been deleted.