How The Web Ruined The Encyclopedia Business

prostoalex writes "Don't remember an encyclopedia salesman knocking at your door lately? Turns out, fewer Americans are purchasing layaway plans for heavy-bound multiple-volume sets (once sold at $1,400) and turning to the Web for answers, according to AP/Miami Herald. What's more interesting is that even the software encyclopedias are not selling as well, with Google changing the landscape of finding good reference information. 'Microsoft's $70 Encarta is the best seller but industrywide sales for encyclopedia software fell 7.3 percent in 2003 from 2002,' says Associated Press article."

Comments

Something that should've been in the original post

[sik0fewl]

Wikipedia. I'm sure everybody knows about it by now, but it's a great source of information for just about anything you can imagine.

You are correct

[Raul654]

(Full disclosure - I'm a wikipedia admin) - The premise of Wikipedia is that you can write an article on everything. Unlike major encyclopedias (which might go through 2 or 3 pairs of eyes tops), though, everything on Wikipedia gets peer reviewed many times over. I've seen articles where several dozen people who have modified it. In and of itself, that's an effective form of peer review.

Re:You are correct

[Raul654]

1) Logged in users have access to a "watchlist." It tells you when the articles you are watching were last changed. So if someone comes along and wipes out a years worth of work, it will be reverted very, very quickly (all changes are reverseble).

2) You make two mistaken assumptions. (A) Not everyone edits all articles - people tend to stick to what they know. Therefore, articles are generally edited by informed users. (B) A lot of Wikipedia's changes (50%, if I had to guess) come from a relatively small pool of very active contributors (200 or so), most of whom are very well educated. If you look up an article on Nuclear physics, you'll probably get something that was written by someone majoring in/with a BS in physics or chemistry. So it's not PHDs, but it's not Joe Q Average either.

Re:You are correct

[Hiro Antagonist]

Simple logic. You make an assertion that if rule X is true, than A causes B. If A fails to cause B, than your hypothesis is instantly disproven. If A causes B, but it is later found that an unknown influence C that was associted with A caused B, than your theory would be disproven, and the new theory would be that C causes B.

This is oversimplified, but gets the point across. In addition, in some so-called 'soft sciences' (such as psychology) where there are few hard mathematical rules, than many theories are buoyed more by popular support of the evidence than by anything else -- although, to be fair, this is rapidly changing (as far as psychology goes) with our increased understanding of neurochemistry.

Re:You are correct

[Razor Blades are Not]

Evolution is theory taught in our schools as fact, this is what really gets those of us who believe in creation or creational-evolution "in a twist".
Nice one. So you slip in Evolution with Junk Science, and hope that this makes you sound reasonable.

Evolution is taught as fact in the same way that gravity is taught as fact. The theory of Evolution is as valid based on our current evidence as the three laws of thermodynamics. Now Einstein came along and said "hey - what about this relativity thing I've come up with?" and lo and behold, Isaacs theories didn't go far enough. Does that mean we all float off into space because gravity doesn't work ? Does that mean I can't use a parabola to descibe the motion of a ball thrown through the air ? Nope. Same thing with Evolution. The evidence is there, and hundreds of scientific disciplines rely on this same evidence that supports Evolution for everything from dating ancient objects, to geological surveying and microbiology. Evolution happened... although the specifics of how are still very much under the microscope...

The suggestion that Global warming idea is on the same footing as the Theory of Evolution is a neat distraction, but it doesn't fly.

It's fine to doubt the integrity of specific scientists, or even the political process within the community at large - doubt is a good thing. But lets look at the evidence.. can you point to a specific failure ? Where did the scientific process fall down exactly ? Cold Fusion... nope, their peers caught that.. Global Warming, huh? Jury is still out on that one, waiting for more evidence...

No, I'm not buying it.
Even if the Theory of Evolution is completely wrong*, creationism cannot be pedalled as a scientific theory. There's absolutely no way of falsifying it. It's not testable, because it can never be revised upon discovering new evidence. It remains immutable, and evidence is routinely discarded or rationalized to fit the theory, rather than the other way around.

Creation-Science isn't science.

_______________________________________________
* it isn't.

Re:You are correct

[Anonymous Coward]

People believe in what they like not in the truth. Yes, global warming is on the same footing as the theory of evolution. you won't find a lot of (serious) scientists to contradict it. Sure, they don't agree on details, but except for a few lunatics, they all agree global warming is a reality. It's just that YOU don't like this idea and so YOU choose to believe the lunatics... just like the Jeovah witness don't like the theory of evolution.

Wasn't this one of the selling points of CD-ROMs?

[sharkb8]

I seem to remember ads in 1994 you that could fit an ENTIRE ENCYCLOPEDIA onto just one CD-rom, and that it would also include movies, interactive pictures, etc?

For bound encyclopedias, it's a cost/benefit analysis. For $1400, you can get 2 1/2 years of high speed internet access, with pretty much all the information you can handle. Encyclopedias are just too expensive for what you get.

Response

[Raul654]

The Wikipedia guidelines explicetely say "Wikipedia wants generally accepted facts". We recently had a contributor who added a large number of crank theories into articles presenting them as facts. (For example - "Albert Einstien was an incorrible plaguarist who got all of his great ideas by plaguarizing the documents he had access to while he was a patent clerk"). Essentially, we'll take a certain amoung of fringe theory, as long as it is presented that way. The user in quesiton, by the way, was banned about 2 weeks later for persistent trolling - the entire community wanted his gone.

Ask and ye shall recieve

[Raul654]

How to cite Wikipedia

Re:Computers are much better for looking things up

[ron_ivi]

Parent wrote: "results from the venerable Wikipedia (generally) excepted, I'd trust an encyclopedia"

Regarding Wikipedia and trust, the "page history" feature on the left can help. Not only will the page history protect you against recent vandalism (i.e. in case you see a damaged page before someone has a chance to correct it); a frequently edited page with many contributors may be more reliable than a page that had less peer review.

Re:A friend would like to buy a set

[Anonymous Coward]

They are available. Encyclopaedia Britannica Print Set Suite

1911 Britannica Online

[dbmacg]

The 1911 Britannica is online here: http://1911encyclopedia.org/ For recent information, magazines are best. But for issues like the origin of concepts, or ideas, the 1911 is unbeatable, still. The Online version appears to been run through a scanner, with the technical problems that come with scanning a typeset document. I have not found out how to help the site with proofreading.

There is another option as well

[dsplat]

The idea of a free, online encyclopedia was one whose time had come. The FSF made an announcement of the GNUpedia, but eventually endorsed the Wikipedia. Reading some of Richard Stallman's thoughts in the announcement gives some good ideas about how to make the project work.

ibiblio has started a project recently called Wikinfo. They have a very similar look to the Wikipedia and even link to it for articles they don't have, but they have adopted a different editorial policy. Specifically, they have chosen to use a sympathetic point of view.

static vs dynamic

[rilian4]

IMHO, encyclopedia books and software are both static. Thus by today's standards are out of date very quickly. At least some encyclopedia software can be updated via the web. Even still, things change so fast that internet searches are really the easiest way to find the most up to date information you're looking for.

I tend to put newspapers in the same group. Why look at day old news when you can get up to the minute news at cnn.com or google or a plethora of other sites. I would much prefer looking at the website of my local news affiliate and taking what news I am interested in then and there than have to wade through a paper with all those continued on page n articles or listen through an entire boring newscast to get at the one piece of interesting news for the day. my $.02

encyclopedias worse than MS Ofice racket

[CAIMLAS]

Digital encycopedia sales are down for one very obvious reason: people don't need another encyclopedia. Just as someone doesn't throw away their 1400$ encyclopedia set, they don't just throw away Encarta 2001 because it's a couple years old. It still works.

There simply isn't that much new information created in a given year or group of years, and what does happen is generally quite easy to find online for the first couple years after its occurance in contemporary news form.

Even small to medium sized libraries aren't likely to buy a new encyclopedia edition every year, 2 years, or whatever. My parents still have an enyclopedia set from sometime in the 1970's that is pertinent for a very vast amount of the information you might want to look up. Granted, some of the scientific information is a bit dated, as is the "history" that has occured in the last 25 years, but that's a relatively insignificant amount of time and knowledge.

I have a copy of Encarta from 1995 that is still more than capable of providing more information than Id likely need for a given topic given cursory interest, when and if I'm unable to find the info online.

Re:Nobody educated believed in the flat earth.

[danila]

Another related factoid relates to Columbus. It was sometimes said that his opponents did not believe that one could sail around the globe (implying they were flat-Earth believers), but he in his great intelligence did.

The truth is that everyone knew the Earth was round, but the opinions differed on the circumference. The critics were actually correct, saying that India is too far from Spain. Columbus mistakingly believed that Earth is much smaller than it actually is and India is very close. He was lucky, though, to find another continent (though it would be impossible to miss), or he would undoubtly die on the long way to India.