The book's concept was later developed into two short-lived animated TV shows (the former produced by Millimages[1] and distributed by Schlessinger Media, and the latter produced by Children's Television Workshop and Film Roman), a Dorling Kindersley interactive CD-ROM (including a spin-off pinball game, Pinball Science), and a board game.

A family "ride" involving animatronics and a 3-D film based on the book was one of the original attractions at the San Francisco Metreon, but closed in 2001.

A number of pages were dropped, among them a two-page demonstration of a mechanical coin-operated parking meter and the original descriptions of computing.

A substantially revised edition, The Way Things Work Now, was published in October 2016 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and Dorling Kindersley.

While the individual sections and subsections are changed in The Way Things Work Now, the structure and Table of Contents remain the same.