Daily Archives:March 17th, 2012

Second-hand bookshelves for sale?

The Encyclopedia Brittanica announced this week that, after 244 years, and like the OED not long ago, it was discontinuing its print-based editions. Tim Carmody has a very nicely-written piece on Wired, entitled “Wikipedia Didn’t Kill Brittanica. Windows Did.

Extract:

Print will survive. Books will survive even longer. It’s print as a marker of prestige that’s dying.

Historian Yoni Appelbaum notes that from the beginning, Britannica’s cultural project as a print artifact was as much about the appearance of knowledge as knowledge itself. Britannica “”sold $250 worth of books for $1500 to middle class parents buying an edge for their kids,”” Appelbaum told me, citing Shane Greenstein and Michelle Devereux’s study “”The Crisis at Encyclopædia Britannica.””

In short, Britannica was the 18th/19th century equivalent of a shelf full of SAT prep guides. Or later, a family computer.

“”I suspect almost no one ever opened their Britannicas,”” says Appelbaum. “”Britannica’s own market research showed that the typical encyclopedia owner opened his or her volumes less than once a year,”” say Greenstein and Devereux.

“”It’s not that Encarta made knowledge cheaper,”” adds Appelbaum, “”it’s that technology supplanted its role as a purchasable ‘edge’ for over-anxious parents. They bought junior a new PC instead of a Britannica.””

The article’s not long, and it’s worth reading the whole thing.

In the meantime, I love the fact that I can now carry both the Shorter OED and the Encyclopedia Britannica in my pocket…

© Copyright Quentin Stafford-Fraser