It’s all over for those hefty paper encyclopedias.
No less an authority than The New York Times tells us it is time to “Start Writing the Eulogies for Print Encyclopedias,” that it is all over other than rolling out the last few editions of some last few hard-boiled Luddites who insist on paper encyclopedias, at a price that could easily buy you a decent used car.
$1500 would buy you an encyclopedia when I was a kid, and that’s not so much less than we paid for our first brand new $2100 car.
Obviously this pricing has taken a beating to remain competitive with electronic resources, as I just clicked on an ad for a 2007 Britannica, there doesn’t seem to be a 2008, and got three kinds labeled as follows:
“Encyclopedia Britannica, 2007 Edition, Price: $1,295.00”
“2007 Encyclopedia Britannica Set Package, Price $1,379.00”
“2007 Encyclopedia Britannica Family Package, Price $1,959.00”
I presume the extra money buys the optical disc versions and the Merriam-Websters reference set, as you move up.
This from http://encyclopediacenter.com
Also listed is:
“Encyclopedia Americana, 2006 Edition [latest] Price: $879.00.”
“Compton’s Encyclopedia by Britannica, 2008 Edition.” “$739.00.”
“World Book Encyclopedia, 2008 Ed.” “Classic Binding””$1,029.00.”
“World Book Encyclopedia, 2008” “Spinescape Binding” ” $939.00.”
“Oxford English Dictionary” “Price: $949.00.”
“Websters Third New Intnatl Dictionary w/CDROM Price: $144.00.”
I saw no other references to CDROMs or DVDROMS other than in the pictures, which discs I mentioned above. No separate mentions.
However, I have purchased and witnessed optical disc products of many of these items advertised.
A Personal Interest
I have dozens of paper encyclopedias, right here in my house, so this is a particularly personal article for me to write, even if I AM the inventor of the eBooks that sounded their death-knell.
True, I would certainly give up nearly all of my paper books for eBooks containing the same information. After all, my house has literally sagged under the weight of all my books.
However, I wonder if all of my paper encyclopedias should /EVER/ be expected to be available on optical discs, since most of them are still under copyright, and given the latest US Supreme court decision in “Eldred v Ashcroft” [once labeled “Hart v Reno” and yes, that would be myself], it would appear US copyright will be permanent from now on with nothing ever expiring, contrary to an opinion expressed by Larry Lessig, the lawyer in those cases.
Even if Mr. Lessig gets is stated wish, most of my reference set will not enter the public domain in my expected lifetime, and I, and I will bet on it, expect Mr. Lessig is wrong.
My prediction is that most of these encyclopedias I grew up with and even those my parents grew up with, will remain copyrighted, and thus out of reach of Internet providers that a public domain access renders possible.
True, I have always predicted that paper books could not compete with eBooks simply on the basis of cost/benefit ratios; the cost of the shelving alone for my encyclopedias is as much as I spent to replace them with CD and DVD versions.
Electronic encyclopedias allow you to have any page open next to any other pages, something that was difficult, if not impossible with their paper counterparts.
Electronic encyclopedias allow for exact quotations in seconds– as opposed to those interminable stacks of Oxford 3×5 index card boxes used by the average student before finishing high school.
1990 Was The Big Year For Paper Encyclopedias
18 years never seemed like much to encyclopedists, after all the Britannica refused to mention Einstein in its index for 18 years after his famous 1905 papers that turned the world upside down.
However, 18 years is forever on the Internet, and Britannica did not have anyone on the Internet who could tell them just how big the changes were and how fast they were coming.
Those little mammals scurrying beneath their feet would soon see themselves taking over the world, and it wouldn’t take millions, and millions of years. . .it would only take two decades.
2008 marks two decades since the earliest attempts at newsletter email lists promoting Project Gutenberg eBooks.
It seems so short in years not associated with the Internet, but the truth is that 99% of the people on the Internet today never, ever, had tried the Internet in 1988.
People who started on the Internet in 1988 are considered oldest veterans by most, except for those of us who started in 1971, or even 1969, but that’s another story.
Most experts, including myself, agree that things peaked out for the paper encyclopedia business around 1990, after all you could buy the earlier electronic versions of Grolier, Encarta, and the others that followed suit, for less money, less storage hassles, and they were easy to use and to quote.
Britannica sales dropped an average of 5% per year in the years,
18 of them, since 1990, leaving a paltry 10% remaining, even if, as was the case, that the various head of Britannica denied, and sometimes vociferously, that there was any such trouble.
I happened to know a family that worked at Britannica for years, in the Chicago area, and heard about the secret Britannica CD’s, even as far back as 1986, which were also vociferously denied.
Personally, I think Britannica could have easily stolen the new show from Grolier’s, Encarta, and all the others, simply if the new CD Britannica had been released then, and for the $99 their price people said would be the most effective.
Instead Britannica turned even more Luddite than in the past in cases when they refused to mention Einstein, for years after he became front page news, or published wildly racist articles for the various topics they could be used for.
Every year Britannica refused to release on CD was another year they lost 5% of the market, and trends like that, if going year after year for a decade, do not stop on a dime.
It was already all over.
All that was left was for Tyrannorsaurus Rex to “bite the dust,”
it was already dying.
Today
People used to think encyclopedias and unabridged dictionaries, and the like were big. . .simply because they weighed enough to give you a hernia if you tried to pick them up incorrectly.
They bragged about millions of words, tens of thousands of page numbers, and thousands of articles.
Internet resources offer millions of articles, pages, whatever, including Britannica and all the others.
I won’t go into all the details of the largest Europeans making encyclopedias since 1808, but stopping in 2008, this is so much obviously a worldwide event, not just something happening to an assortment of English language reference books.
The list of full-sized encyclopedia editions in 2010 is not the thing people celebrate. . .it might contain the last efforts of major publishers, or it might be empty of them already.
Worries
Anyone who has thought about this over the years is already now aware that whatever CD or DVD encyclopedia they buy today, even if it is only $99 or less, will probably not work on a computer they are using ten years from now.
Most may not want such an old encyclopedia, but it might be the loss of being able to compare the present to the past that cost the most in terms of our intellectual input.
The REASON I have dozens of encyclopedias is to compare what is in each decade to the rest of the decades. . .I have Britannica editions for each decade back over 100 years.
People wonder why I can predict the future as well as I do, and the answer is because I have studied how the past moved into an array of futures from the 1800s to the 2000s.
A hundred years from now you’ll be VERY hard pressed to find an individual such as myself, who has compared articles from every single decade for over a century.
And by the way, not one of my encyclopedia were bought new, all were from garage sales and the like.
I also collect the yearbooks. . .they tell even more about fast changes than the full encyclopedias.
They will be gone, too.
Along with me.
by Michael S. Hart
Founder, 1971
Project Gutenberg
Inventor of eBooks