Q-files, the Great Online Encyclopedia, will give a great boost to the general knowledge of the whole family. And, for students of all ages, it's a vital help with school or college work. The site, put together by a top British publishing team, has more than 2500 pages covering a broad range of subjects, including all the sciences, history, geography, prehistory, mathematics, technology and the arts. Each page is brimming with information, fun facts, photos, diagrams and illustrations. Carefully verified by academic experts for accuracy, Q-files is updated weekly (sometimes daily), and is expanding all the time. The site is very easy to get around and is completely safe to use. 
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At the foot of every Q-files page there is a link to Q-news, a current news item of general interest. In the yellow panel on the right of every page, you'll see a link to Q-wizz, a set of multiple-choice quizzes on a wide range of topics. There are more than 150 quizzes. We'll be adding more soon.
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Within each subject area you'll find a set of EASY READ pages. As the name suggests, these provide simpler versions of a wide range of topics. 
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Thanks to great translation software, Q-files can be read in more than 130 languages. Look for the "select language" button at the top of every page.
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The Q-files team

Q-files is created, managed and regularly updated by Orpheus Books Ltd, a team of experienced book publishers based in the UK. Established in 1993, Orpheus is one of the world's leading producers of non-fiction and reference books for libraries, schools and the general reader. Over the years, we have partnered with some of the world's largest publishers, including Oxford University Press, Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Gale, Brockhaus, Casterman and many others.

Read our reviews

"AI will be a huge part of our children's future, but it is essential that we don't turn accidentally off children's natural curiosity and are able to develop critical thinking in young minds by feeding them with accurate, age-appropriate, verified information, which the internet unfortunately isn't best known for. We can't afford the latest copies of beautifully illustrated engaging children's encyclopedias on every child's desk, but perhaps Q-files is the next best thing."  

Stuart Wilkinson, Computing / E-safety lead, CEOP ambassador, Westfield Junior School, St Ives, Cambs, England (Feb 2026)

​​​​​​​Read more reviews from Q-files users here.

Subscription info

The kind of expertise we bring to the creation and management of Q-files does not come free. Our content is not produced by AI but by real people, experts in their field. To support this, the site depends on revenue from advertising or, for anyone who doesn't wish to see ads, subscriptions.

For students or parents who want to use Q-files at home, a single-user subscription is £1.99 ($2.50 or Rs. 200) per month. If you take out an annual subscription, you get a 20% discount. It's £20 ($25 or Rs. 2000) per year.

A school subscription for one year is £200 ($250) for up to 250 students in your school or year group. If your school is larger, it's an extra £0.80 ($1.00) for each additional learner. So, for example, if you are a school of 400 students, your annual subscription will be £320 ($400).
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Why use Q-files?

All over the world, students are finding Q-files extremely useful, both as a help with schoolwork and as a trusted source of general knowledge. In an age of misinformation and unreliable AI sources, you really need to ensure your sources of information are accurate—and websites do not get more authoritative than Q-files. Becoming a regular Q-files reader will, without question, make everyone in the family much more informed, smarter and better educated.

Q-files for reading

For those who prefer non-fiction to stories,
​​​​​​​Q-files is a great tool for honing literacy skills. Combine a love of facts and information with the cool experience of being online—which can get through to reluctant readers in a way that sometimes books cannot—then it becomes clear why Q-files is great for encouraging reading. The site covers most school subjects, but there's plenty of stuff about other things too: for example animals, dinosaurs, space, life in other countries, and so on.

Online research
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It's a real skill to know where to go for trustworthy information and how to obtain it with minimum difficulty. The Q-files' search engine has been specifically designed to make topic searches as easy as possible. When you type a term into the search bar, it will come up with either exactly the right page, or offer a selection of just a few relevant pages, from which it is easy to pick the one most likely to have what you're looking for.