After 244 Years, Encyclopaedia Britannica Stops the Presses

http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/13/after-244-years-encyclopaedia-britannica-stops-the-presses/?smid=tw-nytimes&seid=auto

by trustfundbaby • 14 years ago

399 127 14 years ago

mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com

cont4gious• 14 years ago

This is a fantastic example of a company embracing technology (or more generally newer forms of business) and not holding on to the "old way" of doing business.

The fact that their printed volumes account for a negligible amount of their revenue shows that this wasn't even a spur of the moment decision, they saw the writing on the wall a long time ago and planned accordingly.

rwmj3• 14 years ago

It's a terrible example (or perhaps a "fantastic" example of a company avoiding reality for eons). The writing has been on the wall for EB for at least 15 years, in fact there was even a book written about it:

http://www.amazon.com/Blown-Bits-Economics-Information-Trans...

How do we know they're even going to make money now?

meric• 14 years ago

"About 85 percent of revenues come from selling curriculum products in subjects like math, science and the English language; the remainder comes from subscriptions to the Web site, the company said."

They weren't avoiding reality. It looks like they've planned this years ago, but kept printing encyclopaedias while they were still profitable.

Let's say after the year 2015, demand for non-tablets will begin to reduce by 50% per year. Does that mean companies should stop making non-tablets in the year 2015? For some, maybe. What if several competitors has already exited the market (as had happened here), should you exit too? If your competitors left that means although while the pie has gotten smaller, you're getting a larger slice of it. Stay while it's profitable.

Helianthus• 14 years ago

It's weird, but I kinda wouldn't mind having a set of the last Encyclopaedia Britannica. The zenith of 244 years of tradition, an emblem of the transition of our knowledge to an online space, and still very functional in a quaint way...

sev2• 14 years ago

The poetry in your comment is making me want one too, really bad...

diziet• 14 years ago

Yep, there goes $1500~

pnathan3• 14 years ago

Found a set on Amazon for 1K. And $4 s&h?!

We've talked about picking up an encyclopedia before... this kicked it into existence.

brudgers• 14 years ago

I had a 1957 set for nearly 20 years until I gave it to a neighbor in 2004 when I was relocating. He still has it.

It has the Atlas and the dedicated bookcase.

For anything up until the 20th century (e.g. the ancient and medieval worlds), it was probably as good as or better than the current edition - something has to be cut to cover Steve Jobs, the Space Shuttle and the George's Bush.

I will probably find myself another set, but I don't care if it is particularly recent. I can always use Wikipedia if I want to study Pokemon.

danielsoneg• 14 years ago

Not to mention they're just Gorgeous. I had a set I picked up at a thrift store just for the look - Wikipedia's faster, but damn, Britannica had Gravitas.

maratd• 14 years ago

> It's weird, but I kinda wouldn't mind having a set of the last Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Yeah, that idea is only nice to ponder, not to implement. I had a 32 volume set of Funk & Wagnalls Encyclopedia ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funk_%26_Wagnalls ). They are so heavy! Every time I moved ... the horror ... I'm glad I donated all of them.

kragen2• 14 years ago

The article says they have 4000 out of the 12000 that they printed of the 2010 edition still sitting in a warehouse. Maybe they'll give you a discount.

astine• 14 years ago

I wonder what it would be worth in 40 years?

WalterBright• 14 years ago

I have some old sets of books over 100 years old. They're still fairly worthless.

rhplus2• 14 years ago

I would be willing to bet that a 2011 edition of the EB will still be readable by your great-grandchildren but any hard-drives you bequeath them won't.

mseebach• 14 years ago

Slight nit-pick, but I doubt that the 2010 edition is the zenith. Not sure which is, but I would expect it to be from somewhere before the internet started making it redundant.

darrenkopp• 14 years ago

$1,400 to buy it in book form. That may be part of the reason it's not being printed anymore.

sev2• 14 years ago

32 volumes x ~$45 a piece. Seems to make sense. They're hard cover and very beautiful, can be used as a decorative piece as well.

baddox• 14 years ago

The cost of a 2 million dollar yacht may also be justified, but that still explains why not more than a few thousand are sold a year.

edwardy20• 14 years ago

I wonder if selling the most popular Wikipedia articles in printed form for around $100 would have a market.

troymc2• 14 years ago

It's already being done. I stumble across books like that in Amazon from time to time. The reviews usually give it away.

vidarh3• 14 years ago

Search for wikipedia on amazon, and restrict the search to paperback books, and click past the first page or two, and you get an endless stream of books composed of Wikipedia entries.

starfox• 14 years ago

“Some people will feel sad about it and nostalgic about it. But we have a better tool now. The Web site is continuously updated, it’s much more expansive and it has multimedia.”

The future is clearly http://www.britannica.com

rwmj3• 14 years ago

The future is so clearly not britannica.com. That site doesn't even work without javascript, and where the heck is the "Edit" button?

zrail• 14 years ago

Citable facts published by someone reputable are extremely important. Wikipedia is very much not that. britannica.com could very well be a citation for a wikipedia article but never the other way around.

AlisdairO• 14 years ago

Not that I think the future is britannica.com is the future either, but not working without javascript is unlikely to be the thing that stops them (or any site, really) from succeeding.

xxpor2• 14 years ago

I think it's ridiculous in this day and age for people to expect webpages to work without JS.

chc• 14 years ago

I just tried it without JavaScript. It works. It's not pretty, but it's fully functional as far as I can tell. They basically have two different UIs — if you have JavaScript, you get a modern UI, and if you don't, you get a simpler UI that's optimized for a very primitive browser (e.g. those old phone browsers that could only do 32KB per page or whatever it was). Seems fair enough. If you really can't get on there, you might want to check your connection or something.

But hypothetically, even if it were completely JavaScript-dependent, the trend is clearly toward sites that involve more JavaScript, not less, so I don't see why that would preclude being "the future."

camiller3• 14 years ago

> ... and where the heck is the "Edit" button?

Huh, I just pulled up five articles at random and they all had edit buttons. Granted, it doesn't let you edit the main article, but you can create your own version of one or send a suggestion/correction to the editor.

286c8cb04bda• 14 years ago

> Only 8,000 sets of the 2010 edition have been sold, and the remaining 4,000 have been stored in a warehouse until they can be purchased.

I suspect it won't take them very long to sell those copies after this announcement.

blahedo• 14 years ago

I thought the same thing, and I'm a little surprised they didn't do a larger print run for the last edition.

Alex39172• 14 years ago

Looks like Britannica got flushed down the public toilet:

http://www.ideasinactiontv.com/tcs_daily/2004/11/the-faith-b...

tpowell• 14 years ago

How in the hell is this just now happening if ENCARTA was discontinued over three years ago?

Seems like this should have taken place ten years ago or more.

troymc2• 14 years ago

There was still some demand for the printed books, and apparently it was enough to generate some profit. They really are beautiful-looking books. You couldn't decorate your study with Encarta.

On a related note, according to Wikipedia (!): "Microsoft had originally approached Encyclopædia Britannica, the gold standard of encyclopedias for over a century, in the 1980s, but it declined, believing its print media sales would be hurt; however, the Benton Foundation was forced to sell Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. at below book value in 1996 when the print sales could no longer compete with Encarta..."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encarta

vidarh3• 14 years ago

8000 sold in 2010 at $1395 is more than $11 million in revenue. Even if the cost is high, presumably they still made a profit on it until quite recently too since they kept printing them.

mynameishere• 14 years ago

Back in the day, it was a great product. My family had an edition endorsed (in the first pages) by Queen Elizabeth II and Richard Nixon, and I can't calculate how many hours I spent leafing through the pages. I guess that's been replaced by Wikipedia's "Random article" link, but with EB you never got crap about Pokemon.

hengli• 14 years ago

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/1493458/Pokemon

ghshephard• 14 years ago

Interesting how lacking that article is compared to it's Wikipedia Brethren.

waterlesscloud2• 14 years ago

There was huge value in thumbing through these as a child. We could never afford the set, but I had used copies of individual volumes and I spent many, many hours reading random topics. You just don't get that kind of discovery in an online version. Maybe you could, but you don't.

saryant• 14 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random

bartread• 14 years ago

Seriously? YOU don't? You've obviously never experienced the Wikipedia death spiral: 30 browser tabs open all on unrelated Wikipedia pages. It was dangerously close to an addiction for me at one point and the amount of random crap I now know it irritates me I'm still so poor at pub quizes. There's probably some Godwin's Law equivalent where once you've opened a tab relating to Hitler or the Nazis, having started off on an article about Bengal Tigers, you know it's time for bed.

jamroom2• 14 years ago

I agree - I have a lot of nostalgia over this, as we had a complete set of the 1921 edition - reading though that to see just how much the world had changed (and this would have been in the 80's) was fascinating.

joejohnson2• 14 years ago

Someone should implement a "Random Article" link that would select only from a Encyclopedia Britannica-esque subset of Wikipedia.

InnocentB• 14 years ago

http://toolserver.org/~erwin85/randomarticle.php?lang=en&... selects randomly from their list of Good articles, which is the nearest thing I'm aware of, though still not quite what you're describing.

grellas• 14 years ago

It is easy to disparage the Encyclopedia Britannica from a modern perspective - out-of-step, overpriced, outmaneuvered by competitors - but there is a great sadness here at the demise of something that represented an effort by western scholars to "capture the world's knowledge." Imagine assembling a "A" team of scholars and scientists, getting them to make substantial, substantive contributions in each of their respective areas of expertise, and publishing the results under the guidance of a top editorial board. The results echoed in the western world at the highest levels for no less than two centuries, culminating in a famous 1911 edition that was widely regarded as the pinnacle in assembled human knowledge to that time - something to be marveled at. For years, collectors paid a great premium to buy the 1911 edition, just for that reason. Even in the period leading up to the 1960s, the EB was a staple in most every western home where parents valued education and academic achievement for their kids. Whole hordes of door-to-door salesmen supported their families very comfortably just by selling this particular product.

So, yes, the EB became kind of laughable with its clumsy marketing efforts and awkward efforts to adapt to modern technology in the past couple of decades, but be kind to its memory. It was one of the great attempts in all history to try to do what many dream of doing today through the internet and the advantages of the digital age: limited by the resources of that day, for sure, but an amazing achievement nonetheless. There is something special that has died here and, if only for old time's sake, we can mourn its passing.

Alex39172• 14 years ago

> there is a great sadness here at the demise of something that represented an effort by western scholars to "capture the world's knowledge."

Actually the original goal wasn't to capture the world's knowledge, it was to spread the enlightenment idea that man could learn about the world through reason. If anything deciding that they would be better off just generically capturing knowledge is what killed them.

rickmb• 14 years ago

I think you've just touched upon one the most fundamental of reasons why organisations fail to adapt to social and technological change: losing sight of the original mission.

The same could be said about all those that are currently struggling with the changing times, from journalism, the music industry to democracy itself.

mcantelon• 14 years ago

"Let's make a big book with all the stuff in it so people don't have to buy a whole bunch of books." Old people were hilarious.

mnl4• 14 years ago

Imagine how was it like googling in 1993... There was life before the internet, pal.

rhplus2• 14 years ago

I think the most notable aspect of the 1911 edition - and every edition before and since - is that each is still around, distinct and readable. I don't yet know whether people will be able to reference a '2011 edition' of Wikipedia in a hundred years time. I'm aware of various archival projects, but unless they receive continued support, we could very easily be at risk of losing vast checkpoints in the history of humankind. The written word on paper and stone has been proven to last hundreds of years in general and thousands in rarer cases. Magnetic and electronic storage is yet to prove itself in that respect.

nakkiel2• 14 years ago

Well, download a dump of Wikipedia and be done with it. When you say "still around", you should know that digital bits have the potential to be around forever while paper books require a lot of efforts to keep around just a couple of decades.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preservation_%28library_and_arc...

I have an encyclopedia that's now 120 (or so) at home and I don't read it anymore because I'm too affraid to damage it. It's sad because it's gold mine of stereotypes and good words on blacks and gays.

I think your point regarding "checkpoints" is more interesting but still falls moot because Wikipedia uses versionning. If you really cared that much about digital data you would do what you are doing with your book: keeping it.

GigabyteCoin• 14 years ago

Anybody in the world can download a fresh dump of wikipedia every second of every day.

I would think that many thousands of people are doing this every single day right now.

archive.org probably keeps almost a monthly archive on every wikipedia article that has ever existed.

davidcollantes• 14 years ago

This I have thought of for a long time. By doing everything electronically we (or the future generations) are at risk of losing everything. Discounting the useful knowledge, we would be losing sentimental things.

I think it is sad the EB is stopping presses. I think they should continue, if only they could find a way to print it in a way the would reduce its cost considerably. Acquisitive cost, more than anything, is what is killing them.

dbecker• 14 years ago

One of my friends had a housefire last year. Lost hundreds of books, letters, notes from old classes, you name it.

Not a single document from his gmail archive or dropbox folder was lost.

If I want to keep something safe, paper definitely isn't my preferred medium.

DilipJ3• 14 years ago

I doubt they were as altruistic as you describe. They probably viewed it as a good business investment. When you consider the elevated prices they pushed these books out at, and the fact that their online website is festered with ads, it's pretty clear that this is a firm that is primarily interested in the bottom line.

kamjam• 14 years ago

It is sad indeed, especially since it was proper factual information properly researched by people paid to do so. But in reality, I, like most people, rarely pick up an encyclopaedia. It's easier when having an argument at the pub to just pull out my phone and check on Wikipedia.

But, just as I was sad to hear that Kodak is filing for bankruptcy, this is more due to nostalgia. Businesses need to keep moving with the times and the way people consume products and services in these fast changing modern times.

Unfortunately for Encyclopedia Britannica they do not have enough income unlike the Hollywood lobbyists to pay the protection money.

pjscott3• 14 years ago

It's interesting how gradual history can seem, even when we're in the middle of huge changes. Online sources of information just kept getting better, too slowly to really notice, and print encyclopedias seemed less and less relevant, but it wasn't until today that this really hit me. The Encyclopaedia Britannica is no longer being printed. That's kind of shocking, though in retrospect it seems almost inevitable.

electromagnetic• 14 years ago

Indeed history is gradual, but the thing that shocks me about this is that in 3,000 years when our successors look back, is this the period they're going to think our society ended?

Is their society going to be digging through the buried remains of silicon valley and saying "their civilization seemed to disappear when they started mass producing these 3.5" and 2.5" boxes containing sheets of metal.

It seems far fetched, but when all our data is digital, how long before we have a "burning of the library of Alexandria" moment. Thankfully all the companies ripping wikipedia articles and serving them with adverts are actually helping avoid a moment like this. Multiple-redundancy is likely the only method to prevent huge amounts of information from being lost.

pjscott3• 14 years ago

Redundancy is easier than ever. To use your example of Wikipedia, there are a few sites around the world that mirror the periodic data dumps from Wikipedia, and if you feel like donating about 7.7 GB to the preservation of history, there are torrents:

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Data_dump_torrents

On that note, this is probably the best general discussion I've seen of archiving our digital data:

http://www.gwern.net/Archiving%20URLs

pnathan3• 14 years ago

That's a real shame. I guess I had better look around to see if I can get one. There's still nothing comparable to an encyclopedia for being able to browse interesting topics that are reliable.

cpeterso• 14 years ago

It's too bad Encyclopaedia Britannica won't collaborate with Wikipedia. The company could bring their authors, reviewers, content, and experience from a sinking ship to an information platform that is successful but could be even better.

ghaff• 14 years ago

And who would pay for those authors, reviewers, content, and experience? Those Britannica contributors interested in contributing to Wikipedia can certainly do so--and I assume there are some who are. But I'm also sure that many contributed to Britannica because they were paid and, for better or worse, there's no model to monetizing Wikipedia contributions.

colomon3• 14 years ago

"About half a million households pay a $70 annual fee that includes access to the full database of articles, videos, original documents and access to mobile applications." That's $35 million a year, which is not as good as the best year of the print version (which would have $150 million in sales if I'm figuring correctly), but is still not too shabby.

Domenic_S2• 14 years ago

Books don't need a cadre of software engineers pushing out updates for iOS + every Android device, video transcoding licenses, account servicing, servers, an 800-number staffed with tech support...

The book model was far better.

philwelch• 14 years ago

I can't imagine professional authors and reviewers putting up with Wikipedia's culture and political bullshit for long.

yarone• 14 years ago

I recall reading a story (couldn't find it just now) about how Bill Gates tried unsuccessfully to license the Britannica content to create his digital encyclopedia product. Instead, Microsoft cobbled together assets themselves and built Encarta (1993).

Microsoft proceeded to trounce the print Encyclopedia business by creating a better product that severely undercut the traditional players.

Here we are, 2012, finally Britannica is dead. That took longer than expected.

kragen2• 14 years ago

I think Wikipedia is what trounced Britannica (and, earlier, Encarta, which is no longer being sold even online), and that Wikipedia is much more a descendant of Britannica than it is of Encarta.

joering22• 14 years ago

I recall Encarta as the first CD that came with my CD-ROM back then it was 2x read speed.

I was extremely amazed how entire encyclopedia full of content with pictures, sounds and charts that I could most likely never read from start to end can fit into one single disc of a palm size.

History goes on... can you actually imagine in next 250 years what will replace Wikipedia? Imagine this: "After 250 years, Wikipedia shuts down its remaining servers due to lack of traffic".

beza1e1• 14 years ago

What will replace Wikipedia? Something which generates that data automatically from the "citations". I imagine Wolfram Alpha, Freebase, DBpedia, Cyc, TrueKnowledge and more all channeled into a single interface.

jayzee• 14 years ago

I used both products while growing up and I think that Encarta sucked. It was in no way a competitor to Encyclopedia Brittanica.

I read in a book ("Blown to Bits") that one of the reasons why Brittanica flopped was because the sales people did not understand what they were selling. They thought that what they were selling was knowledge.

But most of the customers bought the books to assuage parental guilt, that they were doing enough by their children. Once the computer came around people stopped buying encyclopedia's so that "Johnny would do well in school," and bought computers instead.

Encyclopedia Brittanica did end up becoming a victim of changing technology, but in the short term at least, not in the direct way as is assumed.

camiller3• 14 years ago

One thing I remember about Encarta back when the Pentium 75mHz was king, If you copied a passage of text and pasted it into MS word, it automatically generated a footnote entry. To this day I've never seen any other software do that. (Not saying there isn't any, I've just not seen it)

nodata• 14 years ago

and if you copy and pasted an image, it would appear black.

pnathan3• 14 years ago

There was (is?) some software called PC Study Bible that did/does that.

anamax• 14 years ago

> Instead, Microsoft cobbled together assets themselves and built Encarta (1993).

According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funk_%26_Wagnalls , Microsoft licensed Funk and Wagnalls.

mnl4• 14 years ago

Yet $1400 is a reasonable price... There is a distinctive pleasure in reading a printed encyclopaedia that convenient on-line browsing can't fulfil. Old Macropaedia editions are still useful, I prefer their summaries about physics than those of Wikipedia for instance. I'd love that everything in this world were digitalized, but it's not yet and maybe it will never be. Despite the efforts of many people there are huge amounts of relevant knowledge available on paper only, it makes me sad to realise that this obvious fact -and all those sources- are almost forgotten now.

kpanghmc• 14 years ago

Sad, but inevitable. I owned a copy growing up and it was an invaluable source of information. I remember flipping through the volumes and marveling at how much information I had at my fingertips. For whatever reason my computer has never given me that same feeling of awe and wonder. There's just something about staring at a bookshelf filled with those tomes of knowledge that triggers my thirst for information.

patrickgzill• 14 years ago

I recommend the 1968 or so, EB editions if you are looking for an older one. The 1972 or 1973 was the last of the classic style ones, after that they went with Micropedia/Macropedia etc. which is not what you want.

The articles are well written, and if covering pre-20th century history, literature, or other topics, should still be excellent introductions.

rootbear• 14 years ago

I think the copy at my parents' house is about 1968. I remember when I was young and we got it. I guess I'll have to duke it out with my sister for who gets it!

joejohnson2• 14 years ago

Right after I read this article, I read the wikipedia article on Encyclopedias. I didn't actually know a lot about them.

Edit: Typo.

larrywright• 14 years ago

Raise your hand if you thought they had already stopped printing it.

/me raises his hand

fiatmoney• 14 years ago

Why not move to an on-demand printing model, I wonder? I can understand not devoting a large amounts of resources towards typesetting and storing new editions, but it does seem (at least from the comments here, and anecdotally elsewhere) that people enjoy older editions as objects d'art. There might very well be a market for selling, eg, "new" 1912 editions if you can avoid the warehousing overhead and ship them direct.

Licensing opportunity, perhaps?

mef• 14 years ago

If you don't feel or understand the sadness others express in regards to this announcement, pretend it's hundreds of years in the future and you hear that Wikipedia is finally shutting down, having become an irrelevant artifact of the past.

lukev• 14 years ago

Well damn. Now I feel I need to go out and buy a copy, so I don't get sent all the way back to the stone age in the event of a massive solar flare or nuclear war or zombie apocalypse.

mojuba• 14 years ago

I wonder what technologies and goods would a survivor be able to recreate based on Britannica alone.

pbhjpbhj• 14 years ago

That sounds like a gameshow pitch in the making.

camiller3• 14 years ago

In the novel Lucifer's Hammer one of the main characters built his personal library around that sort of "whit if" scenario. Books like "Way Things Work" vol I and II. texts on primitive pharmacology, how to make insulin, etc. And he did use his stash of books (well hidden) to barter his way into joining a community that was trying to rebuild it's corner of the world.

So yeah, EB would be useful as well.

verelo• 14 years ago

Its sad to see, and in another way a little scary. I sure hope we have enough dinosaurs to burn to keep the Internet running. Long live "The Cloud".

DilipJ3• 14 years ago

I'm sure more carbon is being used in cutting down the trees to turn into paper, and then shipping all of that paper to customers.

moheeb• 14 years ago

Actually chainsaws are pretty efficient.

I say there is no way more "carbon" is used shipping a few thousand books than powering the entire internet.

zeruch• 14 years ago

I never used EB (I had a set of World Book Encyclopedias) but the thought is the same...it is a weird sense of finality that comes with knowing something you grew up with that was so oddly reliable is fading away due to technology that provides things it doesn't (fast iterations on rapidly changing data) but lacks others now possibly perceived as less valuable or assumed without testing the veracity (perceived up front accuracy/fact-checking).

Jun8• 14 years ago

I never really coveted EB but I promised myself that the moment I strike it rich with my startup I will order the print edition of the Oxford English Dictionary: the 20 volume 2nd edition set is just $995 (http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/?view=usa&ci=01986...).

ChristianMarks• 14 years ago

At least they had the good sense not to form the Encyclopaedia Industry Association of America (EIAA)--an organization whose charter would have been to sue random Wikipedia users.

feralchimp• 14 years ago

I'd just like to note that, as with the 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary, the fact that the publisher is no longer going to print future editions does not accurately predict that future editions will be unobtainable in print format.

You just won't be able to get them on Amazon, for 4-figures.

jsyedidia• 14 years ago

You can get the complete EB on the iPad for $1.99 per month.

TriviaCrowd• 14 years ago

The World Book Encyclopedia will live on!

seclorum• 14 years ago

What a pity. I wonder if they'll return to publishing when it becomes cheaper to print iPad-like devices in the near future?

I personally believe that EB had a place in the world. For example, I'd happily pay a few thousand Euro's/$/Pounds for "the complete, historical Encyclopaedia Britannica" that contains every single release of EB back to the beginning. The context of historical discovery that would provide would be amazing.

Of course, it'd have to be digital.

(Disclaimer: I collect old dictionaries for the same reason: culture context as things change over the decades..)

dfan• 14 years ago

I still have my grandfather's 1911 set, which I am trying to still cherish after recently discovering that the whole thing is now on the internet.

My affection for physical objects like books and CDs (and I have acquired a LOT of them) has become increasingly anachronistic, even just over the last five years.

Moschops• 14 years ago

Hopefully the electronic edition will keep going for the foreseeable future; replacing its effect ourselves would be a real pain. Wikipedia just does not replace it; Wikipedia aims to presents consensus of sources on the web (even when it is broadly acknowledged that consensus is wrong), EB aims to present correctness.

After 244 Years, Encyclopaedia Britannica Stops the Presses

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