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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
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?
everything2 is also excellent and offers some great insight and even advice.
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before it could take an hour to find information, and then more than a few hours to then find that information was OUT OF DATE.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.
the web has my blog. britannica doesn't. the web is winning. isn't it obvious what people want?
2 1337 4 u!
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.
[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.
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...
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.
Not all homeschoolers are motivated by a desire to insulate their kids from reality. This, for example, is the basis of our homeschooling method, and it elucidates many of the aspects of the state sponsored education I want to avoid. It was written in 1947, but as far as I am concerned, it matches today quite well. Better, perhaps.
All that is necessary for the triumph of good is that evil men do nothing.
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
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.
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
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.
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 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.
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.
...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.
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.
"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