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After 244 Years, Encyclopaedia Britannica Stops the Presses
- larrywright 15y agoRaise your hand if you thought they had already stopped printing it. /me raises his hand
- cont4gious 15y agoThis is a fantastic example of a company embracing technology (or more generally newer forms of business) and not holding on to the "old way" of doing business. The fact that their printed volumes account for a negligible amount of their revenue shows that this wasn't even a spur of the moment decision, they saw the writing on the wall a long time ago and planned accordingly.
- rwmj 15y agoIt's a terrible example (or perhaps a "fantastic" example of a company avoiding reality for eons). The writing has been on the wall for EB for at least 15 years, in fact there was even a book written about it: http://www.amazon.com/Blown-Bits-Economics-Information-Transforms/dp/087584877X http://www.amazon.com/Blown-Bits-Economics-Information-Trans... How do we know they're even going to make money now?
- meric 15y ago"About 85 percent of revenues come from selling curriculum products in subjects like math, science and the English language; the remainder comes from subscriptions to the Web site, the company said." They weren't avoiding reality. It looks like they've planned this years ago, but kept printing encyclopaedias while they were still profitable. Let's say after the year 2015, demand for non-tablets will begin to reduce by 50% per year. Does that mean companies should stop making non-tablets in the year 2015? For some, maybe. What if several competitors has already exited the market (as had happened here), should you exit too? If your competitors left that means although while the pie has gotten smaller, you're getting a larger slice of it. Stay while it's profitable.
- Helianthus 15y agoIt's weird, but I kinda wouldn't mind having a set of the last Encyclopaedia Britannica. The zenith of 244 years of tradition, an emblem of the transition of our knowledge to an online space, and still very functional in a quaint way...
- sev 15y agoThe poetry in your comment is making me want one too, really bad...
- diziet 15y agoYep, there goes $1500~
- pnathan 15y agoFound a set on Amazon for 1K. And $4 s&h?! We've talked about picking up an encyclopedia before... this kicked it into existence.
- brudgers 15y agoI had a 1957 set for nearly 20 years until I gave it to a neighbor in 2004 when I was relocating. He still has it. It has the Atlas and the dedicated bookcase. For anything up until the 20th century (e.g. the ancient and medieval worlds), it was probably as good as or better than the current edition - something has to be cut to cover Steve Jobs, the Space Shuttle and the George's Bush. I will probably find myself another set, but I don't care if it is particularly recent. I can always use Wikipedia if I want to study Pokemon.
- danielsoneg 15y agoNot to mention they're just Gorgeous. I had a set I picked up at a thrift store just for the look - Wikipedia's faster, but damn, Britannica had Gravitas.
- maratd 15y ago> It's weird, but I kinda wouldn't mind having a set of the last Encyclopaedia Britannica. Yeah, that idea is only nice to ponder, not to implement. I had a 32 volume set of Funk & Wagnalls Encyclopedia ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funk_%26_Wagnalls http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funk_%26_Wagnalls ). They are so heavy! Every time I moved ... the horror ... I'm glad I donated all of them.
- darrenkopp 15y ago$1,400 to buy it in book form. That may be part of the reason it's not being printed anymore.
- sev 15y ago32 volumes x ~$45 a piece. Seems to make sense. They're hard cover and very beautiful, can be used as a decorative piece as well.
- baddox 15y agoThe cost of a 2 million dollar yacht may also be justified, but that still explains why not more than a few thousand are sold a year.
- Domenic_S 15y agoLow sales isn't interesting in itself -- the Golden Ring of retail is a low volume/immense markup business. 244 years of history should also hint at the fact that pricing isn't the issue.
- corin_ 15y agoNo, it simply hints that pricing wasn't always an issue, not that it isn't an issue. The quick way to find out is - if they could make a good profit selling the entire set for $x where $x < $current, would they still be doing it? The answer is yes. The reason the price used to work and doesn't now is that digital equivilents are not only (subjectively) better/easier/etc. - they're also cheaper.
- edwardy20 15y agoI wonder if selling the most popular Wikipedia articles in printed form for around $100 would have a market.
- troymc 15y ago
- starfox 15y ago“Some people will feel sad about it and nostalgic about it. But we have a better tool now. The Web site is continuously updated, it’s much more expansive and it has multimedia.” The future is clearly http://www.britannica.com http://www.britannica.com
- rwmj 15y agoThe future is so clearly not britannica.com. That site doesn't even work without javascript, and where the heck is the "Edit" button?
- zrail 15y agoCitable facts published by someone reputable are extremely important. Wikipedia is very much not that. britannica.com could very well be a citation for a wikipedia article but never the other way around.
- rwmj 15y agoFail at step 1 because I cannot even get to the site (and more importantly, neither can Google), because Britannica does not understand how the web works ... 11 years after the web ate their expensive lunch meetings, they still don't get the web.
- Volpe 15y agoInteresting that we now think "The website is broken" because google can't index it... rather than "Google is broken" ? I remember reading somewhere google executes javascript as part of its crawling...
- lonnyk 15y agoGoogle has parsed and indexed info thru JS for a while now. [1] [1] http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4159807.htm http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4159807.htm
- Yaggo 15y ago
- 286c8cb04bda 15y ago> Only 8,000 sets of the 2010 edition have been sold, and the remaining 4,000 have been stored in a warehouse until they can be purchased. I suspect it won't take them very long to sell those copies after this announcement.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- blahedo 15y agoI thought the same thing, and I'm a little surprised they didn't do a larger print run for the last edition.
- Alex3917 15y agoLooks like Britannica got flushed down the public toilet: http://www.ideasinactiontv.com/tcs_daily/2004/11/the-faith-based-encyclopedia.html http://www.ideasinactiontv.com/tcs_daily/2004/11/the-faith-b...
- tpowell 15y agoHow in the hell is this just now happening if ENCARTA was discontinued over three years ago? Seems like this should have taken place ten years ago or more.
- troymc 15y agoThere was still some demand for the printed books, and apparently it was enough to generate some profit. They really are beautiful-looking books. You couldn't decorate your study with Encarta. On a related note, according to Wikipedia (!): "Microsoft had originally approached Encyclopædia Britannica, the gold standard of encyclopedias for over a century, in the 1980s, but it declined, believing its print media sales would be hurt; however, the Benton Foundation was forced to sell Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. at below book value in 1996 when the print sales could no longer compete with Encarta..." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encarta https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encarta
- vidarh 15y ago8000 sold in 2010 at $1395 is more than $11 million in revenue. Even if the cost is high, presumably they still made a profit on it until quite recently too since they kept printing them.
- mynameishere 15y agoBack in the day, it was a great product. My family had an edition endorsed (in the first pages) by Queen Elizabeth II and Richard Nixon, and I can't calculate how many hours I spent leafing through the pages. I guess that's been replaced by Wikipedia's "Random article" link, but with EB you never got crap about Pokemon.
- hengli 15y agohttp://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/1493458/Pokemon http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/1493458/Pokemon
- ghshephard 15y agoInteresting how lacking that article is compared to it's Wikipedia Brethren.
- waterlesscloud 15y agoThere was huge value in thumbing through these as a child. We could never afford the set, but I had used copies of individual volumes and I spent many, many hours reading random topics. You just don't get that kind of discovery in an online version. Maybe you could, but you don't.
- saryant 15y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
- kijin 15y agoHalf the time, that leads to auto-generated stub articles about small towns in the middle of nowhere.
- aValidUserName 15y agoSo just hit it again until it leads to something interesting.
- grellas 15y agoIt is easy to disparage the Encyclopedia Britannica from a modern perspective - out-of-step, overpriced, outmaneuvered by competitors - but there is a great sadness here at the demise of something that represented an effort by western scholars to "capture the world's knowledge." Imagine assembling a "A" team of scholars and scientists, getting them to make substantial, substantive contributions in each of their respective areas of expertise, and publishing the results under the guidance of a top editorial board. The results echoed in the western world at the highest levels for no less than two centuries, culminating in a famous 1911 edition that was widely regarded as the pinnacle in assembled human knowledge to that time - something to be marveled at. For years, collectors paid a great premium to buy the 1911 edition, just for that reason. Even in the period leading up to the 1960s, the EB was a staple in most every western home where parents valued education and academic achievement for their kids. Whole hordes of door-to-door salesmen supported their families very comfortably just by selling this particular product. So, yes, the EB became kind of laughable with its clumsy marketing efforts and awkward efforts to adapt to modern technology in the past couple of decades, but be kind to its memory. It was one of the great attempts in all history to try to do what many dream of doing today through the internet and the advantages of the digital age: limited by the resources of that day, for sure, but an amazing achievement nonetheless. There is something special that has died here and, if only for old time's sake, we can mourn its passing.
- bcjordan 15y agoI like to think that you're trying to make the point that just as a startup team is more important than their idea, the quality of a thoughtful Encyclopedia Brittanica post is more important than its placement.
- michael_nielsen 15y agoI think you want another thread. If not, that's a very elliptical comment :-)
- amirmc 15y agoWrong thread perhaps? :) (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3700635 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3700635)
- pjscott 15y agoIt's interesting how gradual history can seem, even when we're in the middle of huge changes. Online sources of information just kept getting better, too slowly to really notice, and print encyclopedias seemed less and less relevant, but it wasn't until today that this really hit me. The Encyclopaedia Britannica is no longer being printed. That's kind of shocking, though in retrospect it seems almost inevitable.
- electromagnetic 15y agoIndeed history is gradual, but the thing that shocks me about this is that in 3,000 years when our successors look back, is this the period they're going to think our society ended? Is their society going to be digging through the buried remains of silicon valley and saying "their civilization seemed to disappear when they started mass producing these 3.5" and 2.5" boxes containing sheets of metal. It seems far fetched, but when all our data is digital, how long before we have a "burning of the library of Alexandria" moment. Thankfully all the companies ripping wikipedia articles and serving them with adverts are actually helping avoid a moment like this. Multiple-redundancy is likely the only method to prevent huge amounts of information from being lost.
- pjscott 15y agoRedundancy is easier than ever. To use your example of Wikipedia, there are a few sites around the world that mirror the periodic data dumps from Wikipedia, and if you feel like donating about 7.7 GB to the preservation of history, there are torrents: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Data_dump_torrents http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Data_dump_torrents On that note, this is probably the best general discussion I've seen of archiving our digital data: http://www.gwern.net/Archiving%20URLs http://www.gwern.net/Archiving%20URLs
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- dubya 15y agoThe scenario where paper seems to have a serious advantage over digital is when people disappear or lose interest in maintaining digital copies for a few decades. Paper just sits, relatively inert, in libraries or boxes in peoples attics. Meanwhile, finding a reader for the Jazz disk with your thesis has become impossible.
- pnathan 15y agoThat's a real shame. I guess I had better look around to see if I can get one. There's still nothing comparable to an encyclopedia for being able to browse interesting topics that are reliable.
- cpeterso 15y agoIt's too bad Encyclopaedia Britannica won't collaborate with Wikipedia. The company could bring their authors, reviewers, content, and experience from a sinking ship to an information platform that is successful but could be even better.
- ghaff 15y agoAnd who would pay for those authors, reviewers, content, and experience? Those Britannica contributors interested in contributing to Wikipedia can certainly do so--and I assume there are some who are. But I'm also sure that many contributed to Britannica because they were paid and, for better or worse, there's no model to monetizing Wikipedia contributions.
- colomon 15y ago"About half a million households pay a $70 annual fee that includes access to the full database of articles, videos, original documents and access to mobile applications." That's $35 million a year, which is not as good as the best year of the print version (which would have $150 million in sales if I'm figuring correctly), but is still not too shabby.
- Domenic_S 15y agoBooks don't need a cadre of software engineers pushing out updates for iOS + every Android device, video transcoding licenses, account servicing, servers, an 800-number staffed with tech support... The book model was far better.
- colomon 15y agoDo you have any actual stats to back that up? Software doesn't need to be printed in 32 large, luxurious volumes and sold by a cadre of door-to-door salesmen.
- philwelch 15y agoI can't imagine professional authors and reviewers putting up with Wikipedia's culture and political bullshit for long.
- yarone 15y agoI recall reading a story (couldn't find it just now) about how Bill Gates tried unsuccessfully to license the Britannica content to create his digital encyclopedia product. Instead, Microsoft cobbled together assets themselves and built Encarta (1993). Microsoft proceeded to trounce the print Encyclopedia business by creating a better product that severely undercut the traditional players. Here we are, 2012, finally Britannica is dead. That took longer than expected.
- kragen 15y agoI think Wikipedia is what trounced Britannica (and, earlier, Encarta, which is no longer being sold even online), and that Wikipedia is much more a descendant of Britannica than it is of Encarta.
- joering2 15y agoI recall Encarta as the first CD that came with my CD-ROM back then it was 2x read speed. I was extremely amazed how entire encyclopedia full of content with pictures, sounds and charts that I could most likely never read from start to end can fit into one single disc of a palm size. History goes on... can you actually imagine in next 250 years what will replace Wikipedia? Imagine this: "After 250 years, Wikipedia shuts down its remaining servers due to lack of traffic".
- beza1e1 15y agoWhat will replace Wikipedia? Something which generates that data automatically from the "citations". I imagine Wolfram Alpha, Freebase, DBpedia, Cyc, TrueKnowledge and more all channeled into a single interface.
- joering2 15y ago+1. did not know any of those.. learnt so much today trueknowledge is amazing, thanks!!
- jayzee 15y agoI used both products while growing up and I think that Encarta sucked. It was in no way a competitor to Encyclopedia Brittanica. I read in a book ("Blown to Bits") that one of the reasons why Brittanica flopped was because the sales people did not understand what they were selling. They thought that what they were selling was knowledge. But most of the customers bought the books to assuage parental guilt, that they were doing enough by their children. Once the computer came around people stopped buying encyclopedia's so that "Johnny would do well in school," and bought computers instead. Encyclopedia Brittanica did end up becoming a victim of changing technology, but in the short term at least, not in the direct way as is assumed.
- mnl 15y agoYet $1400 is a reasonable price... There is a distinctive pleasure in reading a printed encyclopaedia that convenient on-line browsing can't fulfil. Old Macropaedia editions are still useful, I prefer their summaries about physics than those of Wikipedia for instance. I'd love that everything in this world were digitalized, but it's not yet and maybe it will never be. Despite the efforts of many people there are huge amounts of relevant knowledge available on paper only, it makes me sad to realise that this obvious fact -and all those sources- are almost forgotten now.
- kpanghmc 15y agoSad, but inevitable. I owned a copy growing up and it was an invaluable source of information. I remember flipping through the volumes and marveling at how much information I had at my fingertips. For whatever reason my computer has never given me that same feeling of awe and wonder. There's just something about staring at a bookshelf filled with those tomes of knowledge that triggers my thirst for information.
- patrickgzill 15y agoI recommend the 1968 or so, EB editions if you are looking for an older one. The 1972 or 1973 was the last of the classic style ones, after that they went with Micropedia/Macropedia etc. which is not what you want. The articles are well written, and if covering pre-20th century history, literature, or other topics, should still be excellent introductions.
- rootbear 15y agoI think the copy at my parents' house is about 1968. I remember when I was young and we got it. I guess I'll have to duke it out with my sister for who gets it!
- joejohnson 15y agoRight after I read this article, I read the wikipedia article on Encyclopedias. I didn't actually know a lot about them. Edit: Typo.
- fiatmoney 15y agoWhy not move to an on-demand printing model, I wonder? I can understand not devoting a large amounts of resources towards typesetting and storing new editions, but it does seem (at least from the comments here, and anecdotally elsewhere) that people enjoy older editions as objects d'art. There might very well be a market for selling, eg, "new" 1912 editions if you can avoid the warehousing overhead and ship them direct. Licensing opportunity, perhaps?
- MBlume 15y agoGrellas wrote an excellent comment, for some reason on the wrong thread: It is easy to disparage the Encyclopedia Britannica from a modern perspective - out-of-step, overpriced, outmaneuvered by competitors - but there is a great sadness here at the demise of something that represented an effort by western scholars to "capture the world's knowledge." Imagine assembling a "A" team of scholars and scientists, getting them to make substantial, substantive contributions in each of their respective areas of expertise, and publishing the results under the guidance of a top editorial board. The results echoed in the western world at the highest levels for no less than two centuries, culminating in a famous 1911 edition that was widely regarded as the pinnacle in assembled human knowledge to that time - something to be marveled at. For years, collectors paid a great premium to buy the 1911 edition, just for that reason. Even in the period leading up to the 1960s, the EB was a staple in most every western home where parents valued education and academic achievement for their kids. Whole hordes of door-to-door salesmen supported their families very comfortably just by selling this particular product. So, yes, the EB became kind of laughable with its clumsy marketing efforts and awkward efforts to adapt to modern technology in the past couple of decades, but be kind to its memory. It was one of the great attempts in all history to try to do what many dream of doing today through the internet and the advantages of the digital age: limited by the resources of that day, for sure, but an amazing achievement nonetheless. There is something special that has died here and, if only for old time's sake, we can mourn its passing. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3700881 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3700881
- mef 15y agoIf you don't feel or understand the sadness others express in regards to this announcement, pretend it's hundreds of years in the future and you hear that Wikipedia is finally shutting down, having become an irrelevant artifact of the past.
- lukev 15y agoWell damn. Now I feel I need to go out and buy a copy, so I don't get sent all the way back to the stone age in the event of a massive solar flare or nuclear war or zombie apocalypse.
- mojuba 15y agoI wonder what technologies and goods would a survivor be able to recreate based on Britannica alone.
- pbhjpbhj 15y agoThat sounds like a gameshow pitch in the making.
- camiller 15y agoIn the novel Lucifer's Hammer one of the main characters built his personal library around that sort of "whit if" scenario. Books like "Way Things Work" vol I and II. texts on primitive pharmacology, how to make insulin, etc. And he did use his stash of books (well hidden) to barter his way into joining a community that was trying to rebuild it's corner of the world. So yeah, EB would be useful as well.
- verelo 15y agoIts sad to see, and in another way a little scary. I sure hope we have enough dinosaurs to burn to keep the Internet running. Long live "The Cloud".
- DilipJ 15y agoI'm sure more carbon is being used in cutting down the trees to turn into paper, and then shipping all of that paper to customers.
- zeruch 15y agoI never used EB (I had a set of World Book Encyclopedias) but the thought is the same...it is a weird sense of finality that comes with knowing something you grew up with that was so oddly reliable is fading away due to technology that provides things it doesn't (fast iterations on rapidly changing data) but lacks others now possibly perceived as less valuable or assumed without testing the veracity (perceived up front accuracy/fact-checking).
- Jun8 15y agoI never really coveted EB but I promised myself that the moment I strike it rich with my startup I will order the print edition of the Oxford English Dictionary: the 20 volume 2nd edition set is just $995 (http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/?view=usa&ci=0198611862 http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/?view=usa&ci=01986...).
- ChristianMarks 15y agoAt least they had the good sense not to form the Encyclopaedia Industry Association of America (EIAA)--an organization whose charter would have been to sue random Wikipedia users.
- feralchimp 15y agoI'd just like to note that, as with the 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary, the fact that the publisher is no longer going to print future editions does not accurately predict that future editions will be unobtainable in print format. You just won't be able to get them on Amazon, for 4-figures.
- jsyedidia 15y agoYou can get the complete EB on the iPad for $1.99 per month.
- TriviaCrowd 15y agoThe World Book Encyclopedia will live on!
- seclorum 15y agoWhat a pity. I wonder if they'll return to publishing when it becomes cheaper to print iPad-like devices in the near future? I personally believe that EB had a place in the world. For example, I'd happily pay a few thousand Euro's/$/Pounds for "the complete, historical Encyclopaedia Britannica" that contains every single release of EB back to the beginning. The context of historical discovery that would provide would be amazing. Of course, it'd have to be digital. (Disclaimer: I collect old dictionaries for the same reason: culture context as things change over the decades..)
- dfan 15y agoI still have my grandfather's 1911 set, which I am trying to still cherish after recently discovering that the whole thing is now on the internet. My affection for physical objects like books and CDs (and I have acquired a LOT of them) has become increasingly anachronistic, even just over the last five years.
- Moschops 15y agoHopefully the electronic edition will keep going for the foreseeable future; replacing its effect ourselves would be a real pain. Wikipedia just does not replace it; Wikipedia aims to presents consensus of sources on the web (even when it is broadly acknowledged that consensus is wrong), EB aims to present correctness.