Ángel Franco/The New York TimesA set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica on the shelves of the New York Public Library.
After 244 years, the Encyclopaedia Britannica is going out of print.Those coolly authoritative, gold-lettered reference books that were once sold door-to-door by a fleet of traveling salesmen and displayed as proud fixtures in American homes will be discontinued, company executives said.
In an acknowledgment of the realities of the digital age — and of competition from the Web site Wikipedia — Encyclopaedia Britannica will focus primarily on its online encyclopedias and educational curriculum for schools. The last print version is the 32-volume 2010 edition, which weighs 129 pounds and includes new entries on global warming and the Human Genome Project.
“It’s a rite of passage in this new era,” Jorge Cauz, the president of Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc., a company based in Chicago, said in an interview. “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.”
Full story at The New York Times.
2 comments:
No surprise, I have wondered for some time when this would happen.
The ease of "browsing" through a set of encyclopedias when I was in my early school years is what I think the youth of today have already or will lose. Like paging through a National Geographic magazine and discovering new and different things you could never imagine to search for, the encyclopedia provided immediate access to varied content. You pulled one off the shelf, never knowing what it contained, and always found something of interest as you paged through the volumes of interesting facts and information.
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i hope they can duplicate that experience on-line. I will be checking how well they have done.
I use wiki all the time but I know what I am looking for, the wandering wonder world of youth may not know what to search for and may need what we experienced in the "pedia", exploring the world "at your fingertips" with just the flip of a page.
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