Thanks for the questions! I bought the ninth edition so I could have copy in my own bedroom; I was possessive about books as a child. I bought the thirteenth

Thanks for the questions! I bought the ninth edition so I could have copy in my own bedroom; I was possessive about books as a child. I bought the thirteenth edition after reading an article in the New Yorker magazine about the eleventh. I’ve added a screenshot of the first page of that article to my website above. As explained in that New Yorker article as well as in the parent Spectator article, those old Britannicas made particularly good reading for people who like reading deeply about miscellaneous topics. Later editions aimed for more objectivity and, because of all that happened in the twentieth century, had to cover more topics on the same amount of (or even less) paper. That made them less suitable for expository writing and for recreational reading. From 1986 until 2005, I worked at home as a freelance Japanese-to-English translator. I translated a wide variety of texts about many topics, many of which I was not familiar with (currency sorting machines, oil refinery equipment, Korean ceramics, automobile racing, French film, ...). Since going to a library to look up a few words or facts would take a lot of time, I gradually acquired a large collection of paper dictionaries, encyclopedias, and other reference books. I also bought quite a few CD-ROM references, though most of those had the same content as the paper versions. Beginning in the late 1990s, first with search engines (AltaVista, Google) and then with Wikipedia, it became quick and easy to look up facts online, and I gradually stopped using paper references. As others have noted here, Wikipedia is not as entertaining a reading experience as the old Britannicas, which could be opinionated, even witty, while also reflecting the prejudices and biases of the authors and their age. Wikipedia’s great strength is its breadth. The topics covered in Britannica have always been slanted toward matters that mainstream academics and educators consider important and legitimate. It was nearly useless for pop culture and subculture topics, and it didn’t have enough space for all of the obscure stuff that Wikipedia covers in often obsessive detail. Of course Wikipedia has problems with errors, vandalism, and sometimes sloppy writing, but overall it is a magnificent achievement. I am very grateful to be able to use it.