Wikipedia kills off Encyclopaedia Britannica, at least in print
Share This article
Nearly two and a half centuries after the first edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica was released, the printing presses have stopped. Gone are the traveling salesmen hawking the books door to door, making for yet any victim of the digital age. From here on out, the reference books that all of us used at one time or another will head to the web.
Chicago-based Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc. will stop selling the current edition once inventory are depleted. This means that the 32-volume set, which costs $1,395 and includes some 65,000 articles, will be the last printed by the company. The focus will shift to the web version which runs a much more palatable $69.95 per year and currently has about 500,000 subscribers.
Britannica sees their online version as a natural progression of things: “In a larger sense this is just another historical data point in the evolution of human knowledge,” the company said in a blog post announcing the move. “For one thing, the encyclopedia will live on — in bigger, more numerous, and more vibrant digital forms.”
The death of what could be considered the most important reference work of modern times can be laid directly at the foot of another marvel of modern learning: Wikipedia. The site, while written by anyone and not just the “Nobel laureates, historians, curators, professors, and other notable experts” that comprise Britannica’s writers, is generally a good resource. Wikipedia is also free, and that is a big draw (so is the rest of the Internet as well). In a time where knowledge was not easy to come by, paying a premium for a source like Encyclopaedia Britannica made sense. Now, not so much.
In response, Britannica will pin its future on the web. This seems well and good, but even at $69.95 there’s a cost — most people will still turn to Wikipedia and other free sources. One thing the publisher may have going for it is the position of educators, though: many forbid Wikipedia as a source for papers and the like due to its crowd-sourced nature.
With the content within Encyclopaedia Britannica coming from reputable and knowledgeable sources, it still is a top-tier source for students — and respected by educators — even though a 2005 study by Nature showed Britannica had nearly the same amount of errors in its articles, on average, as Wikipedia. I guess image is everything.
This all noted, there is a future for reference materials in book form. While the usefulness and speed of the Internet is nice, for some nothing beats the printed word. Yes the market has shrunk dramatically, but I strongly believe there’s too many of us old fashioned folks out there to let it completely die. Would you?