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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."
What concerns me about Wikipedia is that I don't think any particular credentials are required to publish an article in it. I think something like Britannica would have tougher standards.
I'll be the first to say that, for encyclopedia-level research, I do just about ALL of it online. Don't think there's anyone on this site who does any differently.
But, as a teenager, I got a full Encyclopaedia Brittanica from my grandmother as a gift. And the nerd in me couldn't keep me from picking up a random volume, leafing through it and waiting for something to catch my eye.
The variation on that would be that I'd look something up, and, in the process of finding the right page, some other entry would catch my eye and I'd read up on something (usually completely unrelated) after finding what I'd originally gone looking for.
Hypertext kicks ass. Ain't no arguing against that one. But search engines show you what you were looking for - it's a lot harder to 'stumble across' completely unexpected stuff on online reference engines. I ain't buying another paper encyclopedia, to be sure... at least not at the price my grandmother paid for mine... but, in the quest for pure, unadulterated trivia, there ain't nothing like it...
Im sorry to sound crass, but the overwhelming cost of encyclopedias was:
1)The cost of printing. This is expensive when you consider the cost of 24 Hardcover books.
2)The cost of fact checking. Again, this is expensive, as your credibility relies on your information being correct.
With the freedom of information that the internet has provided us, (1) is a non-issue. (2) However, is still an important one. As we all know, just because its posted on the internet (in duplicate at times!) its not always true. In the end, you might just end up with what you paid for, or you might end up reading a factual, cutting edge lab study that was posted the week previous. Personally? I use wikopedia and everything2.com when im looking up something that piques my interest. When im writing a paper? I'm going to be hitting up a libray and dusting off an encylopedia. Sure i'd use internet sources (read:google) as a tool, but id be extremely carefull with my sources.
In the light of this I'm not surprised that the print sales are down. I'm perhaps more surprised that the electronic ones aren't doing better - results from the venerable Wikipedia (generally) excepted, I'd trust an encyclopedia before Google for general basic research. It's not so much a problem for me, but young people don't have as finely tuned BS detectors as older folks; they believe anything they read on the net. It's near impossible to get them to limit themselves to peer-reviewed sources in their papers, and they really do come back with some absolute crap from some random website.
Parents would do well to consider this when weighing Google against a good CD/DVD-ROM or a subscription to britannica.com; it's a lot cheaper than the print version used to be, and it's guaranteed quality information. Google is an invaluable tool, but it doesn't replace traditional sources of information. (At least until Google Print comes out of beta - then we really will be somewhere.)
I'm not sure how good that argument is, considering that an encyclopedia published in Gallileo's time would be subject to similar pressures and would probably also claim the earth is flat.
D
I'm not sure exactly how you'd define "young people," but it's been my experience that the fallability of internet resources has been one of the most common topics drilled into the heads of middle- and high-school students, at least in the past decade or so. When I was in middle and high school (not too many years ago), we had entire class periods dedicated to learning which sources are worthy of taking a look at, how to check for bias, and which sites aren't worth anything (read: anything from geocities, for example, or anything with little animated "Under Construction" gifs). Use of the internet was encouraged to be limited and mostly supplemental; use of periodical indexes (such as Jstor) was highly encouraged.
That's really where the power of the internet is, as you point out - in the specialized reference engines that are freely available to just about any college student and most high school students. For home use, there are other specialized reference engines depending on what you want to look up (www.mdconsult.com comes to mind for physicians). But remember, we're talking about general information here, not writing a thesis - usually you'd use an encyclopedia just to get an the basic idea of a topic, something that a quick google scan or a free online reference site can almost always accomplish.
All of this discussion assumes that the sole purpose of owning an encyclopedia is information access.
Many middle-class households (the only ones who could afford a traditional print encyclopedia) bought them for their symbolic value: they showed that you were reasonably well-educated, that you valued education, that you could afford encyclopedias. They also bought them because of pressure not to "let your kids get behind" in an increasingly competitive academic environment.
These are precisely the reasons that many parents bought (and continue to buy) home computers. Just look at how personal computeres were marketed in the early 1980s, when it was not at all clear why you would want one. Look at how they are marketed to parents today.