There will be no more printed editions of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Henceforth, it will be online only.
Only 8,000 sets were sold of the final 2010 edition. Top sales were in 1990, when they sold 120,000. I’m surprised that sales were always that low; I know it’s a once-in-a-lifetime purchase for most individuals, but I still would have thought that the market was bigger than that.
Did any of you have a print set at home? Are you online subscribers?
Growing up in the 70s, my family had a 1970 World Book. My dad was military, and he picked up this set somewhere overseas. It was a knockoff from Taiwan; the pages had literally been xeroxed, in black and white on thin paper. In the article on China, the Communist revolution and all subsequent history had been redacted. I confess that I was such a nerd that I read through the whole set as a child. Was anyone else here an encyclopedia reader?
I have three: a complete set of Macropedia, Micropedia, and Compton’s, all 1992 ed. My parents bought them from a door-to-door salesman when I was in grade school, now I have them… I think I’ll keep 'em, even though I never use them. I used to read them for fun.
In the early 60s, my father contributed an article (or more) to Britannica, so I grew up with a set. I also still have a set of Encyclopedia Britannica Junior, with the last copyright date of 1963.
So yeah, it’s a once in a lifetime deal. (Sometimes it’s interesting to look up articles to see how things have changed in the nearly 50 years since those books were published.)
I had a print set at home which got trashed in one of my moves, and have intended to replace it someday. Maybe now I won’t.
I always had a volume on the table with a book mark in it, and whenever I felt like it, I’d sit and read 10 or 50 pages. It’d take me about three years to work my way through, then I’d start again.
I was never lucky enough to have the entire set, but when I was a kid somehow I got several volumes of the 14th edition (1929). It’s amazing how entertaining it was to read, with its often florid writing style and the “sun will never set on the Empire” mindset. Heck even then it was having problems staying current; I’ve read articles from the 1960s reprint that were virtually the same as the ones from 1929! That said the much more matter-of-fact style of the Micropedia/Macropedia version is both more accurate and much more dull.
The oldest continuously published encyclopedia in the English language will publish its last issue of its last edition. It does not look like there will be a Sixteenth Edition forthcoming. Thus, the Fifteenth Edition joins the Eleventh Edition. Of the 8,000 sets printed, 4,000 sets remain to be sold to the public. You can buy the set at $1,395, or you can wait until the inevitable price drop. Somehow I think that it would be an investment in more ways than one.
Don’t you mean “Wikipedia is continuously edited”, Mr. Cauz? :rolleyes:
No, Mr. Marchionini, anything worth discussing is worth getting no point of view.
The “wisdom of the crowds” has given us “pop culture topics that would not be considered worthy of a mention in the Encyclopaedia Britannica”. There is one article of value in Wikipedia if there really is such a thing as “value”. (I did not find Value in the Macropaedia; however, I did find Philosophy.) Here is the article. Wikipedia:List of 2007 Macropædia articles
One is reminded of the ending of the film Flubber. Instead of a word, stork, what is given is a number, 32. And if Wisdom does not makes sense to you, then, I give you Truth (note printed Physics textbook). Now you have Knowledge.
Give it a few decades, maybe. I help out at the annual “library friends” used book sale, and we won’t accept encyclopedias or multi-volume reference books anymore. They’re too hard to sell and too heavy to lug to the dump.
OTOH, I treasure my Compton’s Junior Illustrated edition (ca. 1955) set. It’s fun to look up stuff and see what we knew back then, but it’s probably online anyway.
Underline mine: people aren’t buying one, now. We didn’t have the Britannica, but I recently helped my mother throw away several of her encyclopedias (I’m keeping one that’s general and very in-depth, she’s keeping one on art): by the time the Nephews need to use encyclopedias, we expect them to be looking at them online.
I had to read t’whole lot from age 18 months and answer cryptic quiz afore I could go to bed. And if I got it wrong I had to type out answers w’out supper!
Well, I had to translate a volume into Hungarian each night, then sing it to the tune of “I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy”, without pen or paper, at the age of one. And if I got it wrong, I was flogged to death. People these days have it easy.
I’m actually nostalgic for the days when you could get encyclopedias on CD-ROM. I found it amazing that so much info could be stored on such a small thing.
I’d be slightly tempted to purchase the Encyclopedia Britannica on DVD-ROM or perhaps a flash drive. Since I pretty much always have a reliable internet connection, it wouldn’t really be worth it, but I still find it neat.
The Encyclopedia Britannica will continue to publish online, just like Wikipedia (which did not, if I am correct, ever have a print version). Jorge Cauz, the president of Encyclopedia Britannica Inc., tells the NY Times, "We cannot deal with every single cartoon character, we cannot deal with every love life of every celebrity. But we need to have an alternative where facts really matter. Britannica won’t be able to be as large, but it will always be factually correct.”