I distinctly remember it was a Christmas day, but I don’t know the year. It must’ve been about 1980 or so, because we’d just moved into our new house. Mom sat my brother & I down after we’d finished opening our presents & told us, “Boys, we have a special present for you that will be here in a few days. It cost a lot of money, but we think you’ll really like it.”

I immediately thought to myself, “Oh my God! We’re getting a car!” The fact that I was maybe 13 at the time, & my brother was 11, didn’t stop my excitement. What else could it be?

She continued: “We bought you a set of the Encyclopedia Britannica!”

I was both disappointed—it wasn’t a car!—but also intrigued. I was a nerdy little kid (who grew up into a nerdy big man), & I actually read encyclopedia articles at school. Having my own encyclopedia at home, & especially the king of encyclopedias, the Britannica, would be pretty cool.

A week or so later, I came home from school, & there was a huge box in the family room. My buddy David & my brother Gus & I tore it open, & there they were: the 30 or so volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica. We paged through them, moved them into the library room in our old house (yes, we had a room with floor to ceiling shelves that was “the library”), & there they sat.

Every once in a while I’d pull a volume off & read an article about something I was interested in that day, like Ancient Rome or volcanos. It came in handy for school reports, too, of course. But I mostly used it to settle arguments during dinner (yes, I was that obnoxious kid). “Hold on!” I’d say, “Let me go look it up!” And off I’d run into the library, stalking back triumphantly a few moments later with volume 10 in my hands, open to page 403, finger pointing to the paragraph that settled whatever dispute we were having.

That was then. 30 years later, those volumes still sit in the library in my Mom’s house in Marshall, Missouri. By the time I was in college, I never looked at them, & I’d be shocked if anyone has opened one of those books in the last 15 years. They’re out of date, bulky, and now that we have the Internet in our pockets, why in the world would we turn to 3-decade-old encyclopedias?

Some day I’ll have to throw them out, but for me, as much as those books symbolize expert knowledge handed down from on high, they also remind me of a mother’s desire to better her children. That was a lot of money in 1980, especially for my family, but she spent it for Gus & I because that’s what the Encyclopedia Britannica symbolized then: learning, knowledge, and education. But, as I said, that was then.

Today? Not so much. Here are what a few other writers had to say about the announcement that Encyclopedia Britannica was shutting down its print version to focus solely on digital.

Some interesting facts from the Bloomberg article announcing the change:

  • The 2010 edition costs $1,395 for all 32 volumes (I presume it still has the micropedia & macropedia).
  • No job cuts (that’s good). But what about the encyclopedia salesmen? Turns out it hasn’t sold the Britannica door-to-door since 1996.
  • The first digital version of Britannica was published in 1991 (that has to mean “CD-ROM”, since the Web was barely alive).
  • Print sales peaked in 1990 with 120,000 copies.
  • Revenue breaks down as follows:
    • Print version of the encyclopedia: less than 1%
    • “Curriculum products”: 85%
    • Website subscriptions: ~15%

From Devin Coldewey’s Encyclopedia Britannica Consigns Print Edition To History:

Only 8000 copies of the 2010 edition were sold; 4000 are being warehoused.

…

A few professors or old-fashioned types may value the sets, but it’s hardly a secret that if your goal is the storage and distribution of valuable knowledge, a bulky, expensive, 32-book set is not the way to go about it.

They’ve built a company that has lasted two and a half centuries on the supposition that “Facts Matter.” When faced with the choice of continuing to make the same product they offered 244 years ago and continuing the mission they started 244 years ago, Encyclopaedia Britannica chose the latter. It’s a choice many companies would be proud to make, but few will ever have that opportunity. It’s not every day someone makes something that lasts a quarter of a millennium.

From Deven Desai’s Print is Dead; Long Live the Word (Britannica Stops the Presses):

Will folks pay for the online version at $70 per year? I would guess not. Nonetheless Cauz claims that people interested in expert opinions will turn to Britannica: “Google’s algorithm doesn’t know what’s fact or what’s fiction,” Cauz concedes. “So Wikipedia is often the No. 1 or No. 2 result on search. But I’d bet a lot of money that most people would rather use Britannica than Wikipedia.” So far the evidence seems to be to the contrary. Wikipedia seems to hold up well.

From Harry McCracken’s No More Dead-Tree Encyclopaedia Britannica: Sad, But Not That Sad:

Britannica never seized the opportunity of the electronic age. When Microsoft proposed collaborating on the CD-ROM that became Encarta, the Britannica people turned down the opportunity. Sales of the paper version fell by more than half between 1990 and 1994, years before Wikipedia showed up.

…

Thanks to my iPhone, I can carry Wikipedia in its entirety in my pocket, and consult it whenever a question pops into my head. I don’t think there’s a rational reason to prefer a printed encyclopedia to a digital one.

Wikipedia is far from perfect, but so is the Britannica, and if I were forced to choose between them, I’d opt for the more exhaustive, ambitious, accessible, continuously-updated, no-cost Wikipedia in a heartbeat.

From Julie Bosman’s After 244 Years, Encyclopaedia Britannica Stops the Presses:

[Jorge Cauz, the president of Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc.] said that he believed Britannica’s competitive advantage with Wikipedia came from its prestigious sources, its carefully edited entries and the trust that was tied to the brand.

…

About half a million households pay a $70 annual fee for the online subscription, which includes access to the full database of articles, videos, original documents and to the company’s mobile applications. At least one other general-interest encyclopedia in the United States, the World Book, is still printing a 22-volume yearly edition, said Jennifer Parello, a spokeswoman for World Book Inc. She declined to provide sales figures but said the encyclopedia was bought primarily by schools and libraries.

…

“There’s more comprehensive material available on the Web,” [Gary Marchionini, the dean of the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill] said. “The thing that you get from an encyclopedia is one of the best scholars in the world writing a description of that phenomenon or that object, but you’re still getting just one point of view. Anything worth discussing in life is worth getting more than one point of view.”

…

“[Print encyclopedias are] used by anyone who’s learning, anyone who’s new to the country, older patrons, people who aren’t comfortable online,” [Sonya Durney, a reference librarian at the Portland Public Library in Maine] said. “There’s a whole demographic of people who are more comfortable with print.”

From Robert Wright’s Loving Encyclopaedia Britannica:

Whereas books—novels, biographies—will live on for a long time in electronic form, I don’t think the traditional encyclopedia will, even if for now Britannica will survive as a website. The whole idea of a top-down, orchestrated, unified compendium of knowledge makes less and less sense in a world where fact and analysis can arise in a bottom-up way and be organized by technological tools for your edification. (I’m not talking just about Wikipedia, which actually has its top-down elements, but about the whole internet.) I can’t remember the last time I got out a volume of Britannica for the purpose of actually using it.

And, leaving aside Britannica’s archaic logistics, there’s something quaintly pre-post-modern about the premise that for every subject there is a true expert who can be counted on to give you the objective truth.

…

But I do believe there is such a thing as truth, and that argument among all of us half-blind people moves us closer to it. Wikipedia as a whole is way closer to the whole truth than any one contributor to Wikipedia can be. And you’d like to think that Wikipedia, and even the entire internet, will move closer and closer to the truth. Maybe, long after even the electronic edition of Britannica is gone, the idea of Britannica can remain for us what it once was for me—a kind of Platonic ideal that we aspire to evolve toward even if we can never reach it, something that has a kind of reality even if we can never touch it.