I have to admit: when I wrote last week’s article about the Encyclopedia Britannica‘s going out of print, I jumped over to Wikipedia for a little bit of fact-checking. I’ve gone on record lamenting the demise of the multi-volume printed reference set, even feel a bit of nostalgia for it, though I haven’t looked something up in the EB since probably 1998. Even then I was already using Encarta most of the time, which was cheaper, quicker, and more interactive than its printed counterpart. And I feel I’m pretty representative of the general population in my preference for Wikipedia and its freeness over a costly, leather-bound encyclopedia set.
I’ll still feel a bit of nostalgia for the old era of printed media, but the numbers are in: Wikipedia wins out over the old guard in cost, size, weight, frequency of updates, amount of content, and even revenue. Last year the Encyclpaedia Britannica netted $11 million in revenue, which Jimmy Wales’s personal appeal banner ads raked in over $60 million in donations. I’ll add one more field in which Wikipedia takes the cake, and I’m surprised this didn’t show up on the graphic: Language. You can read Wikipedia articles in 284 different languages, including simplified English and Esperanto. The Britannica? Like the former empire it originated in, it would prefer you speak English.
Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc. hopes to stay competitive in the digital age through tablet apps, online subscriptions, and curriculum resources. I wish it all the best, but it will have a hard row to hoe in competing against Wikipedia’s chief advantage: it is absolutely free.
I’ve been feeling a little nostalgic these past few days, especially in light of the Encyclopaedia Britannica’s recent decision to stop printing hard copies of their reference set. For years the Britannica was our “key to the information age,” whatever that means, and now that they’re gone, I don’t know how kids are going to get their reports done when it’s raining out.
So in honor of Britannica’s flagship product and her decomissioning, here’s a set of videos that’ll take you back in time to a more analogue age. The latter three star Donavan Freberg, son of satirist Stan Freberg. He voiced the Peanuts characters Linus and Charlie Brown in a series of commercials in the late 70s, and Tom Little, of The Littles, among other things. But enough with the introduction. Enjoy.
tl;dr Watch these Encyclopedia Britannica commercials. They’re comically outdated.
“How far do your kids have to go when they need information in a hurry?” I love it.
“They bought me a computer, a video camera, a compact disc player, but … hardly any of this stuff can really help me with me schoolwork.” Keep ’em coming, Donavan. Here’s a follow-up:
“This is like having your own research library at home!” Indeed it is. Indeed it is. And one more:
“I think I’m too young to use it.” That’s Yeardley Smith, by the way, voice of Bart Simpson doing the kid’s part. Go figure. Meanwhile, in 2012, my two-year-old niece uses an iPhone better than I do.
What about you? Are you going to miss the print editions of the Encyclopedia Britannica? Plan on buying a set? Don’t care at all. Let us know how you feel in the comments.
Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 depicts a future world in which books are no longer published, and where members of society instead receive their information in rooms with screens for walls, or falling asleep at night with little seashell radios in their ears. Sound familiar? It’s not bad foresight from an author who wrote almost 60 years ago. Oh, except for this: in the novel, books aren’t published because they’re illegal to possess, and if you’re caught hoarding published material Firemen come and torch your entire house. Other than that, though, Bradbury was pretty spot on.
Print media does seem to be dying a slow, protracted death, though, and while books will no doubt stick around in our culture for generations to come, their dominance in the field of information propagation is already at an end. Unlike in Bradbury’s novel (available now in both print and digital formats), the end of books is less likely to come with a bang than with a whimper. In the past few years, newspapers and magazines have started to founder and die, marketers have increasingly eschewed print media for online advertisting, and last May Amazon announced that the Kindle overtook paperbacks in total sales. Now another another icon of the print world is going digital-only, as the Encyclopedia Britannica announced yesterday that it will cease its 244-year print run and focus on publishing its content solely through interactive media. Here’s a video released by the company explaining the new step in its product’s evolution.
The company states that this development–though certainly a momentous event in the company’s quarter-millenial history–is “in a larger sense … just another historical data point in the evolution of human knowledge.”
“For one thing, the encyclopedia will live on—in bigger, more numerous, and more vibrant digital forms. And just as important, we the publishers are poised, in the digital era, to serve knowledge and learning in new ways that go way beyond reference works. In fact, we already do,” says the Britannica Blog.
This means that there will be no 2012 publication of the hitherto bienally-updated multi-volume encyclopedia set, and Jeopardy runners-up will have to get a new parting gift to grace their homes (or wait–didn’t they just start getting money several years ago?). The encyclopedia will also be competing more directly with Web-based, open source reference sites like Wikipedia. Currently the Britannica Online service costs subscribers $69.95, which help pays a team of over 100 professional editors and numerous expert contributors. A print version of the final set is listed on the site at $1,395.00.
The 2010 release will be the final print edition. It’s comprised of 32 volumes containing over 65,000 articles.
I’ve long been a fan of holding books in my hands, rifling through crisp new pages, smelling musty old volumes, and throwing a copy of my favorite text into my backpack without worrying about finding a power outlet or wireless hotspot to connect to. So this news comes as a bit of a (very minor) personal tragedy to bibliophiles like me. However, I can’t complain too much, as I never exactly found it in my budget to shell out fourteen hundred for a clean, leather-bound set. Britannica is doing what it’s got to do to stay competitive in today’s market, against content that’s edited and updated daily, even hourly. So we’ll say goodbye to 244 years of books most of us couldn’t afford to put on our shelves, and I might try to pick up a 2010 set years down the road, provided it doesn’t become a collector’s item.
There’s one thing about the announcement that I haven’t made peace with yet, though. How will I one day explain to my now young nieces and nephews, even my own yet unborn children, why this sketch is funny?
