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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."
Maybe people just stopped looking things up!
Life in Orange County
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.
I remember when legal used to mean lawful, now it means some kind of loophole. - Leo Kessler
Remember some of those awful Encyclopedia CD's they put out? They were buggy and hard to use. If they were making good Encyclopedia DVD's (with video, etc), they could probably do alright.
The Encylopedia Industry just needs a lobby. How about EIAA? Sue and whine when your business model fails to make money. It's the American Way.
You probably shouldn't click this.
Candle sales down... candlemakers blame the electric light bulb.
the candlemaker lobby are asking for sanctions to keep the vital candle market afloat.
Why don't you embrace your slashbotness instead of living in a dreamworld?
For some odd reason, this isn't suprising, since you don't need a heavy bookshelf or storage area for a stack of CD's.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
everything2 is also excellent and offers some great insight and even advice.
...was sometime in 1995. This isn't exactly new, given that encyclopedias stopped being useful when search engines were invented... --pete
I'd pay money for an encyclopedia that didn't have an entry about goatse.
I can't begin to state how much having the internet has affected myself, and society as a whole.
Never before have the key values of resourcefulness and problem solving been so apparant in individuals and the work place, where before wrote memorized knowledge was necessary.
Having the internet, and refined resourcefulness trumps anyone who has wrote memorized anything. With the internet as a resource, instead of a 30 book bound volume set of encyclopedias, a resourceful person can find answers and implement them in minutes, where before it could take an hour to find information, and then more than a few hours to then find that information was OUT OF DATE.
i love the internet and everything it's done for me. I'm not a super genius, but being extremely efficient and resourceful, and knowing how to use google, has made me look like a fricken star both to peers and my employer.
-Jeff
Everyone always uses "Google" when they just mean any old search engine. AS if the streets would be filled with encyclopedia salesmen if we all used Yahoo! and AltaVista.
Second, have you noticed that MS gives Encarta away with everything ?
Third: Duh! Universal free access to a worldwide information store is eliminating the need for large, expensive and quickly obsoleted books? My god stop the presses. In other news the Edison wax cylinder is no longer used in favour of a strange plastic disc read by lazers, wax salesman frieghtened.
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.
Trust me.
This is a really good illustration that even for a great deal of scholastic knowledge, a distributed effort is better than a concerted one.
For very specialized knowledge encyclopedias are still useful, and it's hard (for me at least) to discount the pleasure of opening a volume at random and learning about something I never had the first idea about. Sure you can try the same trick with the web though I'm not sure the results would be the intended one...
For a while the Britannica was free online, but this is no longer the case.
the web has my blog. britannica doesn't. the web is winning. isn't it obvious what people want?
2 1337 4 u!
(Scene : A front door of a flat. A man walks up to the door and rings bell. He is dressed smartly, like a Salesman.)
Salesman: Burglar! (longish pause while he waits, he rings again) Burglar! (woman appears at other side of door)
Woman: Yes?
Salesman: Burglar, madam.
Woman: What do you want?
Salesman: I want to come in and steal a few things, madam.
Woman: Are you an encyclopaedia salesman?
Salesman: No madam, I'm a burglar, I burgle people.
Woman: I think you're an encyclopaedia salesman.
Salesman: Oh I'm not, open the door, let me in please.
Woman: lf l let you in you'll sell me encyclopaedias.
Salesman: I won't, madam. I just want to come in and ransack the flat. Honestly.
Woman: Promise. No encyclopaedias?
Salesman: None at all.
Woman: All right. (she opens door) You'd better come in then.
(Salesman enters through door.)
Salesman: Mind you I don't know whether you've really considered the advantages of owning a really fine set of modern encyclopaedias...(he pockets valuable) You know, they can really do you wonders.
(Cut back to man at desk.)
Man: That man was a successful encyclopaedia salesman. But not all encyclopaedia salesmen are successful. Here is an unsuccessful encyclopaedia salesman.
(Cut to very tall building; a body flies out of a high window and plummets. Cut back to man at desk.)
Man: Now here are two unsuccessful encyclopaedia salesmen.
(Cut to a different tall building; two bodies fly out of a high window. Cut back to man at desk.)
Man: I think there's a lesson there for all of us.
Encyclopedias for home schooled kids whose parents are afraid of the Net.
They'll save a lot of pages by replacing many of the articles with references like "Good children do not ask about such things" and "Your parents will tell you on your wedding day" and "It's only a theory."
The web makes is easier to find information fast, and with no tie to physical medium, yes, but when it comes to the veracity of the information, it can be difficult to make a case for whether or not it is accurate.
Anybody can type anything and have it show up on the web. Most of the time, it is even well-meaning information, eg, with the intent of being accurate. The issue is that people sometimes make mistakes. When you're writing about who your favorite Pokemon character is, mistaking the stats of Pikachu for Megamonkey isn't that bad. When you're posting information about a medical procedure or tolerances on a shear pin, though, being wrong can literally be the difference between life and death. The advantage encyclopedias have over web content is that everything much pass peer review and fact checkers.
I predict that while the 'paper encyclopedia' business may suffer in the future, the businesses that generate the content may begin to restore revenue by offering information that is in digitally signed chunks of information that an end user can be sure of or by offering fact checking services for people who can sacrifice context for finding out if a specific fact is true. Maybe a publically available article about gunpowder will give me all the steps needed to safely make it, but I might then pay $.5 to ask an intelligent software agent at Brittanica.com to read the URL of that public article and tell me if it's accurate or not.
I love encyclopedias, and I think there will be a market for them well into the future (people still buy dictionaries, don't they?), but part of capitalism is keeping your business relevant, and it looks like the encyclopedia companies have some challenges ahead of them.
A friend's kid turned in a report on General Lee full of references to a 'Boss Hogg', a guy named 'Roscoe P. Coltrane', and some woman named 'Daisy', and it turns out that wasn't what the teacher had in mind.
It has been some 4 years ago now that I had an encyclopedia seller visit my house (selling the Encyclopedia Brittanica actually).
He called in advance, and I explained to him that if anything, I would be interested in an electronic version of it and possibly in a subscription for a web based version.
The guy sayd those things were available and I asked if he could demonstrate them and he said he would.
Wgen arriving at my place, he had a suitcase of paper with him, which looked all nice but was noit what I asked for. He did not have an electronic version with him.
The guy got rather pissed at me when I told him that I was not going to do any business with him because of this.
Now, EB could have sold me an encyclopedia but didn't due to this stupid salesman, not because of the web or anythign else.
I'm happily using the web now, and used encarta for a while. They will do for many things.
[given two things:
1. they are still available
2. i actually end up with kids one day]
I spent a lot of time when I was 6-12 years old reading my parents encyclopedia's and old college textbooks from cover to cover. I can still recall a lot of things (over 20 years later) that I read when I was a kid that have stuck with me, without further exposure or reinforcement.
Actually, scratch #1 up there, if they aren't available, I'll find an antique set for them.
Encyclopedias were great for quick facts. If one needed to look up a brief explanation of something, you found yourself an encyclopedia and thumbed through it. Well, with a DSL line and Google, it's a faster, cheaper, and more convenient way to get information.
As for written assignments, encyclopedias aren't too valid as sources of info, so as a child hits his teens and the assignments get more "challenging," the need for an encyclopedia diminishes.
Gone also are those "Internet Yellow Pages" books with URLS in them, and any other compilations of information that change more rapidly than any print publication could.
I'm shocked! Old businesses with a strong attachment to their traditional business model are finding it difficult to change, you say? And to add injury to insult, you also tell me that they're suffering economically for this very reason? I can hardly believe it. Why, next you'll tell me that our beloved American recording industry has also fallen prey to the ogre that is technology, and that the telephone companies are having to scramble to avoid obsolescence...
RIAA claims decrease in Encarta due to illegal downloading and swapping.
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...
Unfortunately, I remember encylopedia salesmen a bit too well. During mid 1980s I received an offer that said "free desk reference set if you respond". I responded and when the salesman went to schedule a sales appointment, I told him "you are welcome to come, but I have no intention of buying encyclopedia Britanica." He said then he wouldn't come. I pointed out that their offer still said, "free desk reference set" and this seemed like a fraudulent business practice. His response was, "then take it up with the FTC."
So, I wrote the FTC and the local BBB. I also sent a copy in care of "Presidents office, Encyclopedia Britanica". My letter didn't get any visible response from FTC or BBB, but I did get a phone call from the legal office at Encyclopedia Britanica. They carefully explained that what happened was not their policy. Shortly thereafter a local rep of Encyclopedia Britanica called to apologize, indicated that the salesperson had been fired and came to provide both a sales call and desk reference set. I listened politely, said "no thanks" and still feel bad for causing someone to lose their job.
I haven't used the DVD version, but I assume the articles are as good. By comparison MS Encarta is a joke. It has a lot of articles but they're half the length of Britannica's at best. The atlas is good though and is probably the killer feature in the 'Deluxe' version and it's the reason I own it.
I guess the ultimate encyclopedia would combine the articles from Britannica with the atlas from Encarta.
Still, neither of them is free. Happily Wikipedia has filled that vacuum quite nicely. I'm sure some of the content is pretty dodgy (or pointless), but it does benefit from a great breadth of articles and a keen team of volunteer editors to keep it going.
(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.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
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.
The Goatse article was Wikipedia's 7th most active article in February, with 24,425 hits.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
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.
Then again, an encyclopedia produced just last year would report the nation of Iraq as a Democracy, not the currently accurate "Military Dictatorship". But, many web sites are out of date, as well.
I guess it all comes down to a modified version of the "library skills" and "critical thinking" we were supposed to have learned in grade school. Can you locate credible infomation and differentiate it from discredible information?
:wq
Net has a lot of information, but excluding some projects as wikipedia or project gutenberg, you can't allways trust the source. Here in Spain I've been hoaxes believed and reaching the mass media just because "Internet said it". Not everything in the net is trustable, and a good encyclopedia, at least, has a name you can cite. Also, encyclopedias use to have a neutral point of view, so important in wikipedia, some would remind, and it's not the same information and opinion. Obviously encyclopedias, in printed format, are outdated quickly, but the problem is paper, not the thing itself, probably going online and digital is the best way to compete with a Google that is not what it used to and an Internet full of hoaxes and not so neutral points of view where finding truth is too hard.
DON'T PANIC
Wikipedia worries me less than Google.
With Wikipedia, there's the assumptions that there is at least a few people who might know something about a topic who happen upon it. Just because there's no "formal" criticism of the content doesn't mean that it doesn't get critiqued and fact-checked.
Google, on the other hand, has no fact checking ability. And, making things worse, for Google to fact check itself would ruin all of the reasons why people would want to use it in the first place.
So there's really no way to prevent somebody's kid from somehow managing to confuse neo-nazi websites for reliable sources while writing a paper about Hitler.
Gentoo Sucks
I recall a specifc project in Social Studies that requied the class to make an economic comparison of the G7 countries. My only source was the Encyclopedia Britannica and the information was already six years out of date. Of course, I lost marks for using out of date information. Where else could a high school student obtain up to date economic information? I wasn't about to go through every issue of Business Weekly to get it.
With the Internet, I could have that information in a few minutes, even seconds if I find a good source. Encyclopedias just cannot compete with such instantaneous and nearly cost free knowledge.
James Burke has touched on this phenomenon is his latest series of books. That the explosion and specialization of knowledge has lead to where we are today, that no one really "knows" anything anymore and that as soon as something is discovered it is obsolete. Those that will prosper the most in the future will have skills that lead to them the sources of knowledge they require without the need to retain that knowledge for themselves (his theory).
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.)
Encyclopedias hold a special place in my heart. When I was entering college, some of my older relatives decided to dump, excuse me, bless me with their collection of encyclopedias from the early 80s. Ah, yes, these 15 year old fountains of knowledge would really be a blessing for me to get the most out of my college education.
Years later, as I was cleaning out the house, I came across a dusty pile of now 20-year old encyclopedias. I was going to throw them out, but then said relatives looked on me with disdain, at how I was throwing away their precious gifts. They said they would take them, rather than allow them to be thrown away. 2 months later, when they never came to pick them up, I threw them out. And they've never asked about them again. Although, knowing these relatives, they'd probably demand I pay them the "fair" value of the books. So, not what they'd be worth to someone who lives in the real world (absolutely nothing), but the price they paid for the books + interest + inflation. Gotta love family...
If all you have are silver bullets, everything looks like a werewolf.
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.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
My experience that weened me from using encyclopedias. It was 95 or 96 and my teacher for an international business class in college wanted us to do research on a country of our choise using only the Internet. This was a several day assignment, and part way through the first class I got called out by the teacher in front of the students because I was photoshopping game pieces for one of the civ games. Conversation went roughly like this:
Teacher. Onyxruby, are you done already?
Me. Yup
Teacher. Really? Just where did you get all information?
Me. CIA
Classroom. Laughter breaks out.
Teacher. Your telling me you got information from the CIA?
Me. That's what I just said.
Teacher. Care to share this treasure trove with the class.
Me. Sure.
Teacher gets back there expecting to see that I'm bullshitting her. I show her:
http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/
Everything she wanted from per capita income to the number of tv's was in there. Look on her face went from sheer disbelief to righteous indignation as she started writing it on the white board for the whole class to read. I haven't looked back at encyclopedias since.
How to cite Wikipedia
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
I haven't seen one since the 70's actually, well before the Internet was mainstream. I tend to think that their business model was out of touch before the mid-late 80's.
I used to think the transparencies of the Human Body were really cool, though.
Now, if only I could get rid of all the friggin' Kirby Salesmen that keep bugging me at all hours!!
If this article confuses you, don't worry. It was posted yesterday in a much clearer fashion.
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.
In addition to (2) being important for the internet, I think a valid consideration is how persistant is the information available online going to be in the future. servers are renamed, shut down, reorganized, and so on. Is it going to be commonplace for a person to archive their own versions of someone elses web site in the case that the site closes down? Wikipedia is very popular, if it shuts down in the future, what happens? All of that knowledge could be scattered. If an encyclopedia publishing company closes, the results are still tangible and available either at a library or elsewhere. Will libraries need or want to invest in authorized copies of websites for future reference?
It's funny that somebody pleading for reliability in scientific knowledge believes that Galileo's unpopular theory was that the earth was round.
All employees must wash hands before seeking equitable relief.
Being the nerd that I was, I would randomly pick a volume and then random turn to a page and read an article about something.
I used to do that. Drove my younger sister nuts.
"What are you reading?"
"M."
"You're just *reading* the whole thing?"
"Yep. I really liked 'L'. This is the sequel."
"You are SO WEIRD!"
Slashdot's token middle-aged housewife
It's hard to be a master of anything without a lot of memorization. If you don't have the core information in your head already, you're not qualified for most serious professions, though I admit that having online access to so much information does affect even the way a master will allocate his study time and effort.
"Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded."
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.
You also need checking that an entry reads well, makes sense, and is informative.
A few people have mentioned Wikipedia - my first experience of it came when someone on slashdot linked to an article in a comment a few weeks back.
It was an article about Tesla's Wardenclyffe Tower. Not knowing what it was, but knowing Tesla was generally an interesting guy with some weird theories, I decided to have a look.
Go and have a look, and see if you can work out what the hell the Wardenclyffe Tower is, or what it is for. I was at least halfway through the article before I had much of a clue, and even then I don't think I was sure. That's just bad writing.
I love this part from the 3rd paragraph of the article:
Me: "Yeah, but you haven't told us what the function is yet!"
I've long since abandoned my cellulose encyclopedia collection for the information crack dealer known affectionately as Google. But when I was a kid, my favorite books were my collection of Encyclopedia Britannica. I used to spend hours following a thread from volume to volume, or just reading them straight through. It exposed me to a lot of diverse topics that I probably never would have come across by doing directed searches on Google. The information wasn't as current as whats available on the web, but it was much more complete and trustworthy. Also, I still don't think I absorb information from a CRT as easily as I do with a book.
:)
Parents should really consider postponing their child's computer training and let them spend a few quiet afternoons with books. Besides, I want my kids to see computers as a tool to get things done, and not an end unto themselves(lest I create one more slashdot reader).
And no, I don't sell encyclopedias.
http://www.masturbateforpeace.com/
I agree. I was contacted to block a website through our school district web filter.
www.martinlutherking.org
It's purely a hate/descrimination web site and the domain name is owned by a known white supremacist organization. But the kids that find sites like these view them as if they are fact! Kids don't do a whois search. It doesn't even enter into their minds that someone would post misleading and false information on the web. A simple Google search turns up all sorts of "information" that points to this "factual" website.
Part of me needs to block it, but kids need to see this stuff too, otherwise they'll leave school and suddenly vast swaths of the web are now "unhidden" and they won't know what to believe. Maybe I don't give kids enough credit, but it's a troubling thought that our censorship of the web might be doing more harm in the long run, and I'm a part of that.
Qualitas edurus commercium, nullus penitus net rimor, nullus deus beneficium
I'd love it if Google and the Web were able to produce comprehensive survey articles and concise in-depth analysis. But, as much as is out there, and as good as some of it is, it's not yet a replacement for much of dead tree literature.
Just searching the indeces on SciSearch for articles gives a lot more references in technical areas than just searching what's been put on the web so far (what, maybe 20-50% of what's been produced between 1992-2004?).
Unfortunately, copyright restrictions will prevent my ultimate dream from being realized: having everything that has been published put on-line and indexed and freely searched and accessed. I mean things like Lord Kelvin's papers, the collected notebooks of Ramanujan, the latest edition of the New England Journal of Medicine, etc.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
I don't think I phrased that terribly well - to clarify, I meant that I *would* trust Wikipedia more than the average Google result. I often run searches with 'site:wikipedia.org' appended. That said, I think I would trust it less than a published encyclopaedia; one of the issues I have with Wikipedia is the lack of author attribution. You've only got handles, and even then it's not easy to tell who wrote what. Britannica by contrast has attributed articles from many people eminent in their relative fields. The fact that it's such a fluid work also makes it difficult to cite (although you can reference specific revisions from the history page.) That's the nature of the beast, I know, it's a collaborative work. And it does work, for the most part, for what it is - a general encylopaedia. Traditionally, however, we tend to like to pin specific writings down to specific people. Each new piece of writing does not appear in a vacuum, but is from a known person. Even a site like Slashdot encourages from a registered account, and people take into account posting history, etc.
I know a number of people that have worked at Brittanica over the years, and the stories I've heard come out of that place are unbelievable.
"Owning" perhaps the greatest body of encyclopaedic content at one point and:
1. Refusing to come up with a CD-ROM strategy, for fear of cannibalizing book sales. Encarta comes along and eats their lunch.
2. Refusing to come up with a web strategy for many of the same reasons. The Internet itself eats their lunch.
3. In their defense, they did eventually try to come up with a number of ways to sell/license/share the content, but they were unwieldy and involved dividing the information into about 9 different online/CD/library/educational properties (I'm not kidding). Even their developers could hardly keep them straight.
4. Along the way, they came up with a crazy homegrown network to deal with global access, user profiles, and content updates. From what I heard, it was cutting edge, but it essentially was an attempt to "Akamai" the content in-house. After spending many, many millions of dollars, they outsourced the hosting and management after all.
5. One of the early "Jedi masters" of Search Engine Optimization spent considerable time and effort advising them on how to optimize their site. They made this a back-burner job for about a year, and eventually declined to execute it. Had they executed this correctly, today the entire body of content would be well-googled and highly ranked, giving them traffic potential revenue streams (if they hadn't eventually just closed ranks and made the whole thing a pay site, of course.)
6. Instead, they spent their time and money on things like this: paying $150k per month for a tiny text link on lycos' home page. I know a bunch of companies blew money on things like this (usually with AOL extracting the cash) but they were literally re-strategizing several times a year, and throwing out millions of dollars worth of development hours.
With all that said, it's really too bad, because I found that the developers and some editors are among the most brilliant people I've encountered. For the most part, they had educations of a completely different caliber (MIT, Oxford, Carnegie-Mellon, etc.) but were surprisingly down-to-earth, not name-dropping their Universities in the first 12 seconds of your conversation, for example.
Sadly, the management did not fit that mold. Privileged, self-righteous, cocky, arrogant PHBs. Piss away $millions a year on aforementioned goose chases and blame it on everyone else. I think the only reason it went on like this (and still does) is because the entire operation is owned by an 85-year-old Swiss billionaire who really doesn't seem to care about it, and the executive team keeps him in the dark.
It doesn't surprise me at all to see it all dying, considering this was once one of the premier brands of the medium.
Our library shells out big bucks for web access to some databases and journals.
In this, non-porn searches are similar to porn searches: the good stuff costs. (Not that I'd know anything about this, of course!) Lexus/Nexus search, anyone?
This was another intangible value provided by a print encyclopedia. Right or wrong, it was perceived that the authority of a reputable publisher was behind each article.
Unlike the web, where any idiot (or ideologue) can self-publish. (This post being a case in point). Makes it very difficult to authenticate "valid" information.
I mean seriously, the knowledge was always too general or out-of-date to be of use even before the internet unless you were writing a high school report on what Rwanda is like or something. I say good riddance.
Anyone remember that long-blonde-haired teenage encyclopedia pitch guy in the late 80's? He was even more annoying than the Dell dude.
microsoftword.mp3 - it doesn't care that they're not words...
Just as Wikipedia is undoing the encyclopedia industry with a high-quality, free product, so Wikibooks ( http://wikibooks.org ) is set to do to the textbook industry.
Wikipedia is a great place to find out the current popular interpretations of history and other subjects. They've done a great job at SEO and are likely to become the most influential single source of information on the net on most topics. I notice Wikipedia shows up on the first page for most of my internet searches these days. It is a bit scary having one source that is that influential.
Of course, one of the great things about Wikipedia is that you can read the editing history of the items, and see the political battles raging as different groups try to promote their versions of history.
As for the rest of the net. The majority of pages are opinion pieces. Since the search engines judge sites by link popularity, provocative opinion pieces often get a better billing than factual pieces--more people link to provocative sites than to facts.
The good thing about the old encyclopedias is that it is easy to guess the publishers point of view, making it easier to filter the facts from intepretation.
Yes, it was rather funny when I bought my set of Britannica.
I made three mjor steps when I came into this city (1) I found a woman and married her (2) she found a house and we bought it and (3) I tracked down an encyclopeadia salesman and bought a set.
Well - #3 was the hardest. I managed to find them but had to call long distance as I recall. Eventually this lead to a referal here in the city and a younge chap showed up at the door. He advised that he had to go through his speal. I advised I wasn't interested in his speal - I wanted to look at the covers and the color.
A few minutes later his jaw drops in AMASMENT and he askes "Do you mean you are really going to buy them?" to which I answered: "Well, if you ever show me the damn covers - yes!"
And he says something like: "The company says I always have to go through this speal... This is the EASIEST sale I've ever made!!!"
They only cost about 1 1/2 months salary. I still look at that set with pride. And they are used alot as well. Of all the investments I've made, my encyclopeadias are one of the best.
I wish I had a peer-reviewed BS detector.
I guess we know where the lawyers for the RIAA, MPAA, etc. will be looking for business next.
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.
I don't get it.
...but that doesn't mean that they can spell, construct a grammatical sentence, or logically and coherently advance an argument. My experience was teaching undergraduate level in Ireland. I wasn't teaching English, but found that most of my efforts in correcting papers had to be directed towards fixing these elements.
I'm not still teaching myself, but I've heard a lot to suggest that the upsurge of the internet has exacerbated problems which were only starting to appear in my day. My girlfriend teaches final year school as well as third level, and besides the plagarism issue, many of her students just can't get it into their heads why a random page on the internet should not be given as much weight as an expert in the field. She has gone over it with them, but they are lazy - they want to use the internet exclusively for research as it's easy, whereas going to the library is too much effort.
Part of the problem is that here (in my experience- in the humanities), any half-serious research methodology classes only appear at the postgraduate level. It might be touched on slightly earlier in certain subjects such as history, if you chose a manuscripts option. I agree as to the importance: at a minimum it should be the *first* thing taught in university, and preferably should be introduced even further back in the school system. Research methodology is the humanities is like 'planning' in programming, and it's insane that it just isn't emphasised early enough.
So the article was corrected 16 minutes after your edits. What if I came by in the first 15 minutes and used your misabbreviations in a report I was preparing for work? Then I'd be screwed, wouldn't I?
I'd have to be a fool to rely on Wikipedia for anything important. The way it is now, it's not an encyclopedia. It's nothing but an interesting social experiment.
Yeah, I'm an armchair critic.
The internet has ruined truth. I don't know how many times in a week I get an e-mail from friends and others stating this and that.. To the average person that can't navigate around and find the TRUTH... the internet has become a cluster fsck of lies, half-truths, and etc...
So it's good from your point of view, but all to often someone that spouts how they 'looked it up' on google has no basis for the information they found.
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.
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
Grrr. The Web didn't ruin the encyclopaedia business. The enclyclopaedia companies didn't adjust for the changing market conditions and technology advances.
Saying the web ruined something makes the Encyclopaedia companies appear to be the hapless victims of tehcnological aggression.
So, tell the pointed headed encyclical editors to "giddy-up" and get with the times. Obviously the market has moved AWAY from them not because of some devilish scheme from Tim Burners-Lee but because what they have to offer in the way they are offering it (and I refer to the on-line, CD and paper editions) is just not needed/desired as much as in previous years.
The biggest problem with the Encyclopaedia Companies is that they saw themselves as Encyclopaedia Companies and not information dispensers. If they saw their task on a deeper level than thick leather-bound volumes (i.e., content-focused not package-focused) they would have been on the forefront of the evolution of information cataloguing, referencing, and accessing via the WWW versus being plummeled by the shifting times.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
...is that you thought to yourself "that's sexy, I'm gonna whack off to this" while I thought "I bet he has a prolapsed rectum and cannot walk without shitting in his pants."
yes, I do like responding to my precious little trolls. bite me.
Based on this experience, I've decided that it's FAR, FAR easier to work on a Wikipedia article than one that would go in a commerical encyclopedia. Not just because there's peer review without any institutionalization required(someone reviewing generally reviews the article itself and not the database info), but because the amount of research any one person has to do is minimal for most topics; if you know something, you put it in, else you leave it open for the next guy and mark the article a stub. Eventually someone comes along who knows the bits that are missing, and the article is completed with a minimum of tedium on everyone's part. The articles that nobody knows about, you can post bounties for, and eventually someone brave and passionate about the subject will take on the adventure of searching through dusty archives in the real world looking for the letters or documents that would give him material for an article. There's not really any commercial interest to spoil this picture, since it's all entirely voluntary.
Vandalization is less of a problem than one might think; if the article is simply turned into whitespace, you roll it back from the history, which covers 100 edits IIRC. If there's bad information, someone had to work hard to come up with it and put it there; it can't be done on a massive scale like other forms of Internet abuse, and it takes at most an equal amount of effort to give the bad information a place as a "minority viewpoint," and much less to just roll the page back. If rival factions fight over an entry, then either it gets hammered out over time into something acceptable to both sides, or it gets locked.
However, I admit that I still am hesitant to cite Wikipedia as a source, and turn to the library's Britannica for all my encylopedia citations and fact-checking, just because of that "you never know" tendency. It'll probably go away as the Wikipedia becomes better developed and respected. I know that the development of Internet citations took a similar path while I was in school. In middle school(the mid-to-late 90s), the Internet was still "new enough" that many teachers just banned citing from it outright. Later, by high school, they had developed lists of trusted sites to access. Now in college, I can feasably cite anything I want off the Net if I think it's trustable, but most of what I end up using are official documents in PDF format from some research or government group, because they all post them online these days. Wikipedia citations will probably follow in a year or three.
I completely agree. However, I would also add that print indexes still retain an enormous value. I've often discovered a thread while browsing in an index that was perfect for the task at hand--and something I might not have otherwise thought to consider.
The problem with encylopedias I've seen, is that they don't play to the strengths they have.
Mainly, what I'd like to see is encyclopedias that have a large variety of extensive multimedia. One picture for each topic doesn't exactly cut it... If I could look up "Ferrarri" and find 30 minutes of video-clips, along with plenty of audio recordings, and really detailed information on the cars, I'd be happy to buy the CDs/DVDs, because it's not easy to find that information elsewhere. Unfortunately, digital encyclopedias just tend to be a digitized version of the physical encyclopedias, with an audio clip thrown in here and there.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
The sad news is how the existence of the Internet has diverted and undermined people's reference habits. Many libraries are in fact excellent Internet reference portals which provide cardholders with free access to an array of reference services which otherwise would be costly or impossible for one individual to subscribe to. The library I use (from a large U.S. city) offers an extensive amount of online resources, including Encyclopedia Britannica, the Oxford English Dictionary, an exhaustive list of magazine, newpaper, and other periodical references, and much more. But how many people use this? How many people even value its existence? People are used to the limited ways they know to access the Internet and grow accustomed to their sloppy ways of accessing information. Libraries aren't out there competing for online businesses and their sites don't have lots of glitter.
But more and more whenever I have a chance to set up people's computers I set the local public library's website as their browser's homepage.
Sounds like my house.
"What're you reading?"
"The dictionary. 's pretty good."
After this much eccentricity my family usually gives up, so no-one ever discovered that I only actually read the stuff before and after the alphabetical list of words. And they're amazed when I can read the phonetic spellings ("it doesn't say how to read them").
I works well in scrabble though.
"Go look it up."
"It's not in there."
"How d'you know?"
"I've read it."
Why is anything anything?
The average teacher will have to learn how to deal with that fairly quickly. There's simply no way to block out all the bad sources of information, or even come close.
Either you use the 'net as a source of information and teach kids how to discern good sources from bad, or you give up on the internet entirely. There's no trying to "fix" the internet. You could do some form of whitelisting and only allow access to an approved list, but that's basically the same thing as discerning good information from bad. It also turns the internet into a small series of electronic books.
Personally I think forcing kids to scrutinize early on is the best thing that can happen to education. The pass the buck till later phenomenon goes on until College, and even then it often never gets addressed. You then wind up with people watching Fox specials on "Was the moon landing faked?" and believing it.
AccountKiller
So, the net got rid of paying for info on paper.
Could we ever see it git rid of paying for electronic information?
Will Google or some search engines ever create an "Oraganized factual" area that does the equiv of Lexis Nexis.
This will be very interesting over the next 20 years.
Most software geeks don't need or use Lexis Nexis, however, if you've ever supported a large legal office, you know all about it, and how expensive it is.
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 $.02
...quicker, easier, more seductive the darkside is...but more powerful, it is not.
But how long will it take for something like the Chewbacca Defense to make it into Encarta?
Wikipedia rules!!
2 months later, when they never came to pick them up, I threw them out.
No offense, but paper books have value, even if only as relics of a bygone age. But to think that you threw out a set of encyclopedias breaks my heart. Okay, so much of the information would be hopelessly out of date (geography, for certain), but there's still a LOT of useful info in even a 20-year-old encyclopedia, and it's criminal that you just threw it out. Didn't you at least think about donating to the Salvation Army or Goodwill?
When I was a kid, my parents bought two sets of paper encyclopedias (one for grownups and one for kids). I read the kiddie one until I got to about 7th grade and needed the better info in the grownup set. Keep in mind that by the time I graduated high school, those encyclopedias were already 15 years old, and by the time my youngest brother graduated, they were almost 30 years old, but they STILL HAD SOME VALUE.
Clearly, you never thumbed through encyclopedias at random when you were a kid and stopped to read about tornadoes or the social life of ants. I want my kids to have that enjoyment, and I'm personally looking for a set of paper encyclopedias to share with my kids. Sure, we'll Google the Internet for current info on any topic they need to research, but nothing beats lying down on the floor and opening a random volume of the encyclopedia to a random page and reading something fascinating about the history of dogs.
Digital encycopedia sales are down for one very obvious reason: people don't need another encyclopedia. Just as someone doesn't throw away their 1400$ 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.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
"No doubt true?" It's an urban legend that it used to be generally believed that the Earth was flat. Eratosthenes successfully measured the circumference of the Earth around 200 BC. In medieval heraldry, only the Holy Roman Emperor could use the symbol of the "closed" or arching crown; everyone else had to use the "open" or pointy crown. This was because the Holy Roman Emperor's dominion was over the entire (spherical) world, which the dome symbolized. And persons living in seaports have always been able to see vessels coming up over the horizon. None of these were innovations in Galileo's time, and the idea of the spherical earth was hardly perceived as ridiculous or unacceptable.
I would also point out that Galileo died in 1642, a hundred and twenty years after Magellan's circumnavigatory expedition was completed!
All employees must wash hands before seeking equitable relief.
...but they have one critical flaw...transience. If the Internet develops a maturity where it can preserve valuable information then it might deserve to replace encyclopedias and books in general.
I remember in my childhood fondly looking through an encyclopedia from the 1930's,not because the information was necessarily the most useful because it wasn't current, but because it was a priceless snapshot of the era. It remains to be seen of the Internet will preserve this kind of snapshot of a time or will information always churn, so it is always current which is good for current research, but will it tend to develop some amnesia about the past. By this I don't mean it will lose the great works, because it wont, but will it preserve the smaller but still interesting details of each era.
The way back machine is a very noble effort at trying to preserve this kind of snapshot of the Internet but will it survive and build for 100's or 1000's of years like great books and libraries have?
Enlightened societies have fought hard to preserve books from destruction especially by onslaughts from violent and ignorant warrior cultures. The question is will we be both motivated and adept at preserving digital information. Books last 100's of years. Do we have digital storage media that will do the same or will have to rely on constant duplication of information to preserve it. It seems possible the Internet may preserve information intuitively because it tends to replicate and disperse useful information.
The other obvious problem with the Internet is it is causing an explostion in the volume of information which has to be filtered and preserved. Will the quality information lift its head above the sea of garbage when it comes time to preserve it. Google rankings tend to lift up the quality information but is that enough or do we need an army of editors to raise the valuable so it doesn't drown.
@de_machina
This is not actually a bad thing. This is how the whole internet thing is supposed to work. Changes have occured due to the new technology available to us today. Old, inferior business methods are falling quietly by the wayside. Some collectors will keep old encyclopaedia to show to the grandchildren. People have access to more knowledge more easily thanks to the wikipedia. Society and human culture take a small step forward.
Imagine if the same principles applied to the RIAA or SCO - you don't see these guys lying down quietly. What would things be like if Britannica cited their encyclopaedia as prior art for the internet, slapped down a patent on "method for storing and retrieving information by categorical reference in text and illustrated formats" and charged everyone $699 for using the internet? The RIAA should pay a little attention to World Book, Funk & Wagnells and Britannica. The RIAA is going down next, right?
I am government man, come from the government. The government has sent me. -- G.I.R.
If a teacher asks students to write a paper on Martin Luther King Jr, that same teacher ought to have at least a passing familiarity with history. Consequently, he or she should be acquainted with the notions of propaganda, bias, and people with sociopolitical agendas who lie.
Surely these kids have heard of World War II. Propaganda isn't a new idea. Any teacher who assigns 'impressionable' children any sort of research project should recognize the opportunity to teach kids that propaganda didn't end when Hitler (sorry, Godwin) died. Incidentally, even if you block the worst sites on the school network, how are you going to keep the kids off these sites at home? They're not all going to write their papers in the lab on campus...
~Idarubicin
The sellers may fade away, but the objects will remain -- perhaps long after anything as treasured as the net or discs/disks and ROMs. Don't get me wrong, I use the net everyday and even wrote about Google as a best search engine in 1998 when most people didn't know about it. But there are a few things that need to be stated.
.pdf documents at work all the time and they may read just one or two pages later. It's disgusting really. I keep all harvested information from the net as soft copy, and I print the least of anyone in our company, yet probably read the most.
;-)
Books don't boot, books don't crash and they still work when the lights go out. I can find information in them faster and more reliably than Google. When I look in an index in an encyclopedia, the page I am referred is 100% guaranteed to be there (caching aside.) Showing people how to use computers and software is my living, but I collect reference works as my hobby. I have a dozens of 100 year old books and a few over 200 years old. Yes, they are 'out of date' -- but all information asserts itself in the moment of its promulgation, and most all of it will pass. As stated earlier in the thread, Information is actually always in flux, in any age people have their beliefs of knowledge and in time the collective knowledge-base looks back and laughs. And as another poster said, information about some historical events can be highlighted in one decade vs. the next. Anybody who loves words should see what is contained in dictionaries before the medical-chemical-industrial-complex of post WWII supplanted so many great words and definitions with 'science'. (I love science, but not at the offing of language and culture.)
There will always be a wonderful need for great gobs of information at your fingertips via the Internet, but if you care for a book, it will last centuries. I don't know of too many things that people have created that has the usefulness and durability of books. They may waste a bit of space, but they are nice to look at and hold in your hands too.
Oh yeah one more thing, anybody who wants to bring up the 'save a tree' argument, should be appalled at what the internet and computers has done to the use of paper. People print out 340 page
PS: If anybody is chucking out a 9th Edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, I'm looking to buy.
Vox et praetera nihil
I'm not just suggesting we're more susceptible to manipulation by malevolent conspiracies, in a tinfoil-hat sort of way, but also wondering if we're in danger of losing the archive trail our civilisation has had up to now.
I hope you're paying attention, people.
If you laud this and pan outsourcing manufacturing jobs, you Don't Get It.(tm)
Technology is changing existing models in nearly everything. To embrace it when it's convenient for you, and decry it when it's not, is the height of hypocrisy.