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Farewell, Britannica.

DaikunDaikun
edited March 2012 in News
After 224 years, Encyclopedia Britannica is finally bringing an end to its biannual print publication and going entirely digital.

Source

Do you want to get the final volumes? They're selling a stock of 4000 before closing it.

Comments

  • AprecheApreche
    Who cares?
  • SailSail
    Encyclopedias suck. Good riddance.
  • trogdor9trogdor9
    Physical copies of reference materials just doesn't make sense anymore, so this isn't really a surprising move. Also, Britannica sucks.
  • Victor FrostVictor Frost
    I think encyclopedias are useful, but why in the world would I want one that takes up so much space? Digital is the way to go.
  • UncleUltyUncleUlty


  • WindUpBirdWindUpBird
    edited March 2012
    Once you hit a certain point (middle of high school, maybe earlier), encyclopedias are worthless for academic sources. Britannica is neither as in-depth, nor as broad in scope as Wikipedia, so I don't really mind this happening.

    I don't think this is a death knell for the paper book anymore than major releases moving to CD was a death knell for vinyl, but just a sign that digital media is definitely preferable for huge textual works. It just proves that the internet destroyed EB's business model.
    Post edited by WindUpBird on
  • Jack DraigoJack Draigo
    As one loopy customer put it on notalwaysright.com "I heard books make a room look nice."
  • George PatchesGeorge Patches
    I'd only buy this to preserve knowledge in the event the world ends.
  • trogdor9trogdor9
    Related: The RIT GCCIS (that's the computing school) Honors lab has on display a full set of Encyclopedia Britannica with the label "Emergency Offline Backup of Wikipedia."
  • JasonJason
    I think I just took the red pill.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability_of_Wikipedia
  • DaikunDaikun
    edited March 2012
    Related: The RIT GCCIS (that's the computing school) Honors lab has on display a full set of Encyclopedia Britannica with the label "Emergency Offline Backup of Wikipedia."
    Pics, please. It would provide us with much amusement.
    Post edited by Daikun on
  • johndisjohndis
    We can all thank Obama and his terror squad for this.
  • Dragonmaster LouDragonmaster Lou
    The funny thing is that it probably wasn't Wikipedia that killed the print version of Britannica. It was Encarta and similar CD-ROM based encyclopedias back in the heyday of "multimedia PCs" in the '90s. Think about it -- a set of physical encyclopedias probably ran in the hundreds of dollars, at least. A CD-ROM encyclopedia cost under $100 and sometimes came free with other software (I got a free copy of Encarta with MS Office '95, if I remember correctly). The numbers just don't add up once CD-ROM came around.

    I forget the article, but it stated that Britannica's sales starting going down significantly once Encarta and similar products came out. Wikipedia and such aren't the cause of Britannica's downfall -- just the final nail in the coffin.
  • TheWhaleSharkTheWhaleShark
    Encarta was the best fucking thing back in the day. I remember being floored by video clips in an encyclopedia.

    And now I can stream HD movies on my phone.
  • RymRym
    Encarta was the best fucking thing back in the day. I remember being floored by video clips in an encyclopedia.
    That video of the banana in space! Or the 30 second clip of MLK's I Have a Dream speech!
  • RochelleRochelle
    Encarta was the best fucking thing back in the day. I remember being floored by video clips in an encyclopedia.
    That video of the banana in space! Or the 30 second clip of MLK's I Have a Dream speech!
    I wonder how much they had to pay the King family in order to get those rights.
  • AprecheApreche
    The Star Wars clip in Britannica was the best.
  • highdefinitionhighdefinition
    I read this as "farewell britanick" and actually got worried for a second.

  • GregGreg
    Encarta was the best fucking thing back in the day. I remember being floored by video clips in an encyclopedia.
    That video of the banana in space! Or the 30 second clip of MLK's I Have a Dream speech!
    Banana in space? CONTEXT?
  • RymRym


    So... I saw that ad on TV regularly. When that was a legitimate ad for a real product people actually purchased.

    Our family also did indeed own an encyclopaedia.

  • AprecheApreche
    We had World Book. We got the World Book from our grandparent. Then we subscribed to Year Book for quite some time. There is actually some cool stuff in there. My favorite was the transparent layered pages you could use to see the human anatomy.
  • Dragonmaster LouDragonmaster Lou
    We also had World Book. We also got their Childcraft books as well for a while. Pretty neat stuff in all of them, I thought.

    Of course, I was always taught that encyclopedias were always the first step in doing research for a project. It gets you started, but then you always should look for more in-depth sources.
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