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After 244 Years, the End For the Dead Tree Encyclopedia Britannica
Rick Zeman writes "According to the New York Times, it's the end of the road for the printed Encyclopedia Brittanica, saying, '...in recent years, print reference books have been almost completely wiped out by the Internet and its vast spread of resources, particularly Wikipedia, which in 11 years has helped replace the authority of experts with the wisdom of the crowds.' The last print edition will be the 32-volume 2010 edition."
That actually sounds like a really "cool" thing to own.
I feel bad about keeping and wanting to throw out my hard copies.
...because there's no information from authoritative experts on Wikipedia?
On the other hand, I'd love to own print copy of Britannica. Well, if it were up-to-date and not $1,400.
This is quite sad. I obviously prefer my source of knowledge to be up-to-date, and easily accessible, so online encyclopedias make sense. But...I find it quite charming flicking through copies of encyclopedias that are more than 20 years old, seeing a snapshot of our knowledge at the time, and seeing how we've moved on since then. And what library was complete without a complete set of these on their shelves?
Wikipedia will actually be a useful reference when I can cite it in a paper without looking entirely foolish.
Is this, like, someone trying to print Wikipedia or something?
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
Not going to miss the obnoxious 80's commercial though.
I like big butts and I cannot lie.
Battlestar Brittanica ran on the sify channel for 4 seasons.
They will still have their website, software and other products still around. They are just discontinuing the book series and blaming Wikipedia (not modern progress) for this change.
Just add {In Space!} to anything.
How did the hipster burn his mouth?
He ate pizza before it was cool.
"Particularly Wikipedia, which in 11 years has helped replace the authority of experts with the wisdom of the crowds.'"
Bitter, much?
Good riddance. I always wanted a set growing up and when I got my first job I bought a set. What a disappointment. Grossly over priced pretentious crap living off of a reputation I'm not sure they ever deserved. If you want a paper encyclopedia there are a lot better options than Britannica.
phone books?
- Your stupidity got you into this mess, why can't it get you out? -Will Rogers
http://xkcd.com/978/
On the one hand it makes perfect sense to end publication of a very resource intensive and expensive product that is easily digitized. On the other hand, It feels like a very cold future where the charm of a dusty old book with the feel of leather and paper, the sound when you flip a page and smell of aging is gone. To look back into what was at the time, and unable to be changed or modified, as it was set in print is sad to be leaving.
I've been the biggest proponent of Wikipedia for all my life, and avidly used it in school (citing it, and the sources it cited, to my teacher's ire) since 5th grade. But jesus, just hearing about this causes my heart to ache. Encyclopedia's are great endeavors, and are important as a long term collection of knowledge that could help restart civilization in case, I don't know, Israel and Iran start throwing nukes.
I think the best investment my parents ever made in us kids was buying an encyclopedia. I can't tell you how many hours I sat in our library (a room filled with books on two walls and a giant map on the third) reading about all sort of subjects under the sun and subjects far beyond the sun. Lots and lots of time. I would just pick up a volume and open it at random and start reading. So it's kind of sad that the printed version is going away. Once in sixth grade, in response to some knowledge I gleaned from my encyclopedias, said, "Do you just sit around and read encyclopedias!?" I replied, "Yes, I do."
Phone companies: provide paper copies only to those customers that explicitly ask for one (opt-in), and charge for the printing / shipping costs.
Customers: don't ask for one, unless you have a very good reason to keep a paper copy around.
Oh wait - where I live (NL), that's already how it works... (and the vast majority of people do without a paper copy these days).
I hope they don't stop printing the "Great Books of the Western World" series too. I plan to buy the series in the next few years. Of course that collection is timeless and will not change like contemporary topics do.
If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be-T J
Growing up in the 70s and 80s I always thought I would have my own Brittanica on a shelf in my office/library/den one day. I'm in my 40s now and never got around to it, although I've been tempted in recent years but the problem with keeping the information current always made me decide against it. Knowing this may be my last chance, I might just have to finally splurge.
spins in his grave
When my teachers started prohibiting use of encyclopedias for reports since the articles were considered to be too terse. Never looked at one since. OT, that reminds me that I tried reading them from A-Z as a kid, only got to C though.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
it was overpriced anyway
...but how will Luddites teach their children?!?
Log in or piss off.
"Scientists have been wondering why historical records mysteriously ended sometime around the year 2012. It's as if humanity decided to just stop writing things down, and left everything to oral tradition. It's sad that we will never know what happened between then and the eventua downfall of one of the greatest ancient civilizations that ever lived."
I loved having a set as a kid. Not so much to look up information, but to randomly peruse and get a general idea of what is important in the world. Wikipedia has a "random" feature, but I feel more likely to get some Manga cartoon reference than the article on Hadrian's wall. Now that I have kids, I wanted them to enjoy them as well, without burning out their eyes on computer/TV screens any more than they already do.
Then I saw that a new set is something like a thousand dollars, and even 10 year old used sets are quite expensive. Perhaps the printing quality warrants that kind of a price, but I wonder they couldn't have tried to do it cheaper before dropping that part of their business model altogether.
Or, this might sound like blasphemy to Britannica, instead of fighting Wikipedia, they could join them by collaborating on articles and cut down costs that way. Provide some needed quality photography to Wikipedia, and get something in return?
Before books it was stone tablets and before that it was spoken language and before that it was grunts and hand signals. Technology advances yet the knowledge remains.
I can't find the setting to show the thread scores. And YES MUTHAFUCKERS, I've looked everywhere.
Lacking written records certainly facilitates revisionist history. I just read online that Encyclopedia Britannica stopped putting out printed editions over 25 years ago. So how is this news? ;-)
The US government have made it clear that we have no inalienable rights; any we do not defend vigorously will be taken.
Though I used on-line sources for research now, I used to love flipping through old encyclopedias. I'd sit down, pick a random volume and open it to a random page and just read that article. It gave me a wide and varied collection of trivia. Not a huge asset, but interesting and it came in handy in school. A lot of nights were passed just soaking up knowledge for knowledge's sake. Somehow visiting Wikipedia and hitting the "random page" button just doesn't feel the same.
After reading the story title I immediately looked up Encyclopedia Britannica's article on Wikipedia. As expected, more than half of the article (714 out of 1378 words) was spent on the Issues and Controversies section.
I wanted a copy of this Encyclopedia for my library.
I am John Hurt.
You're the guy who would never have started the project in the first place. The truth about Wikipedia is that the process delivers a quality level that never previously existed. How one assesses its quality really depends on how one approaches it. When you arrive from a blank slate, it's a pretty good first meal. If you're trying to reach escape velocity to intellectual purity and enlightenment, well, endurance athletes classify three quarters of the human diet under poison: sugar, alcohol, cholesterol, additives, and on and on. So true. To an endurance egghead, Wikipedia is outright poison. To a starving African, it's a Swedish buffet.
We're on the familiar terrain here of purity narcissism. Not good enough for my fine brain. Definitely, Wikipedia is not ever going to get there. Out of the 4 million articles, there are maybe 5000 where I'm qualified to heap my scorn. For all the rest, amplified ignorance is vastly superior to no signal at all. In fact, amplified ignorance makes for a pretty good road map for charting the quickest route out of town to the lofty hilltops, if you've got a week to kill. Click. 5001.
... if it were to be printed on vellum. I can't trust anything written on paper : it doesn't get past a few centuries and it's clearly a rather cheap way of transmitting anything.
particularly Wikipedia, which in 11 years has helped replace the authority of experts with the wisdom of the crowds.'
No bitterness in *this* part of their press release. No sir, we're not bitter one little bit because of those fuckers at Wikipedia. We'll even feel a little emotion here and there while they roast in hell like they so properly deserve.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The alleged "authority of experts" is questionable marketing bravado. In the last century, a large percentage of their articles were gleaned from popular media sources of the day and the authors were newspaper and magazine contributors.
I happen to have a set that I inherited from my grandfather. He was kind of a hustler and wore a lot of hats in his life, including drummer in a swing band, bootlegger, and minister. At one point he tried his hand at selling encyclopaedias. What I have is his demo set. It's dated 1929. Since the articles were written one or two years before the edition went to print, the article on the booming stock market and the forecast of endless prosperity is both chilling and hilarious. It's written by a financial editor from the Wall Street Journal. Equally amusing are the ones on being a proper and obedient wife and homemaker from an article in a women's magazine.
Nothing worthwhile ever happens before noon
Their books were generally filled with errors, and older volumes are mostly filled with information that's extremely out of date/incorrect. We are better off with niche books that offer much more information on any specific topic, at a much lower cost. Who, exactly, was even able to afford EB's sets, year after year, or even one of the over 30 volumes from a set?
As long as the computers continue to function, there will always be information available from experts - and it will often be free. Of course, many of the online experts could also be "experts", but there was really nothing stopping the EB employees from also being "experts".
I'm not talking about Wikipedia, either, because I really wouldn't use Wikipedia for anything more than just the gist of a topic, and mostly only for information on media (TV shows, music, anime, etc). If you actually bother to use your brain (yes, I know, it's a lot to ask for), you can usually find expert information from the same people who provide expert information offline.
Information really does want to be free, it's just that sometimes there are people who wish it wasn't, making it seem like it isn't readily available from proper sources.
Far from me to be called a "tree hugger", but in the 21st century, we are still reading PRINT material? Maybe its a generational thing...most my age (mid 50's) probably still read from dead trees, but I stopped a few years ago. Magazines, newspapers, books, reference material. It's EASIER to find something in a pdf or online publication than from something printed. Maybe in 10 years or so dead tree printing will pretty much go the way of the horse & buggy.
"Sun Finally Sets on Britannica Empire."
Boom! Boom!
Thank you, thank you. Thank you very much.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
The 1950s are defined as .. somethingsomething until JFK's assassination. The 1960s continue from then until Watergate (approx 10 years). The 1970s are then until Reagan takes office (a little under 10 years). The 1980s are then until Clinton takes office (12 years).
I'm vague on a few spots because the exact date of Watergate (when it happened? when Nixon left office?) await another bullshit definition like my above one.
Wikipedia's Article on Britannica
60 paragraphs on Britannica's history, status, organization, awards, etc. 15 paragraphs on criticisms, bias, racism/sexism. Cites over 100 sources.
Britannica's Article on Wikipedia
2 paragraphs on Origin and Growth (one of which is devoted to suggesting that Wikipedia is running out of steam or somehow failing in its mission), 4 paragraphs on "Issues and controversies," including a suggestion that Wikipedia was a haven for child pornography. Everything about the article says, "parents, keep your children away from this new-fangled, dangerous, unreliable Wikipedia thing!" Cites no sources. What is really amusing is that Britannica's stated slogan (at the top of every page) is "facts matter." I guess attribution does not. Their home page features an image of a 1st-gen iPad with the caption "looking ahead." If Britannica considers 2010 to be the future, that explains a lot.
I have multiple editions of the Brit. When Sears bought it it died right there. But my 1910 edition? Go away! The internet is unlikely ever to touch it. And to me it is only nerds that can enjoy reading on a computer screen. Somehow, you can identify them by their spelling and grammar on /.
as someone with 6000 wikipedia edits, i would hope in my dream of dreams that every single one of them was directly attributable to the writings of an expert.
wikipedia is not the 'wisdom of crowds', rather it is the liberation of facts from the academic institutes , the translation of those facts into somewhat simple language, and their arrangement together for easy access. something libraries should have been doing a long time ago.
also a good article will present the work of various experts, and indicate which expert holds which point of view.
i do not always meet my goal on wikipedia, but basically, without experts, wikipedia would be a gigantic pile of worthless trash.
I wouldn't count on it. I just tried browsing through their 2007 crawl. All the sites I tried were 404'd.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
i have had edits 'disappeared' from wikipedia. the technical capability is there, and it wouldnt be there if it wasnt used, and it has been used.
furthermore, the tracking of this usage is not good, its not transparent, and the wikimedia administrators are loathe to do so.
now granted, , its a very tiny subset that is censored, and it typically revolves around crap like decryption codes. (my edits were discussing the Sony playstation3 keys... ironically the stuff i was posting had little or nothing to do with the actual keys that could actually jailbreak it... but someone thought it might so they 'wiped it' away.)
the point is that there is no guarantee wikipedia 2010 will always be wikipedia 2010. but if you have encyloepdia britannica 1960, it will almost always be encyclopedia britannica 1960. now, the JSTOR organization found out that even paper editions of periodicals are not always consistent, and archives are not always definitive, but still, the point is, its much harder to go back and censor a book than to censor electronics.
my favorite example is 'Mein Kampf'. you can find paper versionf ot hsi book that mention Hitler's admiration of Henry For.d You can also find editions where this passage has been removed. eraseed. in an all electronic world, the versions with henry ford included are... going to be found on archives, but not necessarily.
the diff with encyclopedia britannica etc is that we had a whole social system called 'libraries' that were based around the idea of storing those things for decades or centuries.
having a few dozen random people with copies in dark corners is interesting, but is it really equivalent? in some ways it may be better, but in other ways, it may not be better.
a good wikipedia article will cite every paragraph at least. when writing about the holocaust, it is a good idea to cite every last sentence.
now, if you want to cite wikipedia, instead just copy the citations, go find those works that were cited, and use them in your paper.
It's sad. I used to have a house full of bookshelves, and I'd read all the books when I bought each one. When I moved several years ago, most of the books remained in boxes. I've been going through them, keeping a few, giving some to the local library, selling some to a used bookstore, sending some early technical books to museums, and dumping the rest into the recycling bin. I just dumped all the original Sun Java manuals, finance books like "Bankruptcy 1995" (the author was a CEO, and he thought the US would go bankrupt in the 1990s. Instead, his company did.), and some reasonably good paperback SF. There's just no point in having wall to wall bookshelves any more. I used to have three six-shelf bookcases of technical books in my home office. Now I have three shelves.
I never owned a Brittanica, although I did have the Oxford English Dictionary, the one in tiny type with the magnifying glass.
Borders is gone, Barnes and Noble is in trouble, and Amazon is moving to downloads. When Amazon goes download-only, it will be over for good.
We would have priced it at $999.99. Dumb limeys, they had it coming.
Apparently you did not realize that since 1900 the Encyclopaedia Britannica has been published by a US company and has switched its content, if not its name, to become a heavily American Encyclopaedia (at the risk of rubbing salt into the wound here is the Wikipedia link). I wonder who's feeling dumb now...
Good Lord we're screwed...
I did the same thing when I was a kid. But now, I find Wikipedia even more fun to read! Not only does it have so much more depth, but there are all those links everywhere in the article, leading to all kinds of other subjects. Now, I sometimes catch my kids reading article after article online!
...Wikipedia, which in 11 years has helped replace the authority of experts with the wisdom of the crowds.
Finally, I can start citing Wikipedia as a credible source!
I used to spend hours randomly browsing through the articles. At some point, over many moves, they were given away. Now, I find I do the same thing, but on Wikipedia.
It used to be that when you visited someone's home for the first time, you could learn a bit about them by seeing what books they had on their shelves... which ones were worn, how chaotic or organized the books were, how many they had, what they were about, how many were lying around in mid-read... and if there was a set of encyclopedias somewhere. And, of course, if there was not a single book in the house, there was something suspect about them.
I suspect that in a decade or two, what I'll learn from seeing books in someone's house is that they are old. I'm sure I'll be included in that.
They just announced that the version presumably from 2 years ago is the last one? Man they really do have a hard time finding experts to keep their info current. I'd hate to be the person that was saving up for the 2013 version. Now what are they going to do with the money buy a car?
I haven't been this sad since the last buggy whip manufacturer went out of business...
Fsckin' wife knows everything!
I have more faith in material printed in the Britannica than some random screed posted on the web. I value my Britannica's because they are a reminder that human knowledge in printed form will outlast the mediums of today.
In a couple of hundred years, assuming civilization survives, a set of these would probably have considerable collector value. Especially if you also owned a first edition of the FIRST EB.
"The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to chance."
...just how much we need "The Encyclopaedia Britannica."
I actually sold the Britannica for a number of years. I love that set of books. My copy is the Bicentennial Edition but I would love to get another nearly-up-to-date edition, plus a complete set of the Great Books of the Western World with accessories. The CD/DVD version (which I have 2010) is good in concept, but the articles are not as comprehensive and it is not easy to browse. My older set had articles by Einstein and other original 20th Century thinkers. In an age when books were hard to come by, the EB educated many people. In later years, as public school destroyed people's ability to read and think, it became less relevant; People didn't go to the encyclopedia to learn, but only to get facts.
Basically, the EB is outmoded as a reference work. About 25 percent of the material is changing at a very rapid rate. Back in 1979 Britannica was exploring the possibility of a computerized edition. One of the criteria was that it be easily updateable as new knowledge arrived and another was that it be easy to use. What killed it at that time was that the illustrations were too massive for the type of storage available in 1979. By the time it was feasible to computerize it, the Encarta was free and people were too ignorant to judge the difference in quality between the larger, more authoritative EB and the pitiful little Encarta. So Britannica got sold to a marketing company incapable of making the necessary changes. Britannica got stuck with a slow Java-based interface, a paid online edition and lousy hyperlink service while Encarta got bigger. Then Wikipedia started making inroads as people's reference work and showed the world what was possible in an online reference (even though it is much inferior academically).
Luckily I still have the editon with major introductions by Mortimer Adler and a volume of reprints of original articles from the 1928 edition with which to stimulate my mind. I also have other reference systems including the DVD version of EB, the complete National Geographic (with its lousy interface and microfilm-type usage), the complete Mother Earth news to 1990 and some others. The new paradigm for a knowledge system will have to be something like a "university in a box" that includes articles, exercises tests, progress reports, review sessions and achivement scoring. I guess I know what my new life's mission is....
BTW... http://www.robertwservice.com/modules/smartsection/item.php?itemid=884
"The mind works quicker than you think!"
I remember I politely told the fellow I was speaking with at the kiosk that the price they were asking for was simply unjustifiable, given the cost to reproduce a CD was on the order of pennies, and the price was going to have to come down by about factor of 10 or even more before people would really start taking the CD version seriously. I offered the reasoning that if a person was going to spend that kind of money, they might as well spend what was, relatively speaking, just a bit more and get the attractively bound books.
The guy at the kiosk told me quite flatly that would never happen... that they'd be more likely to simply stop selling the CD version.
I shook my head, suggesting he was wrong... and left.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Im glad its being discontinued. I cant imagine how many trees get chopped down for these every year.
Im not a "save the trees and whales" hippie but I always say these as a huge waste of resources. All that wood lost plus all the gas used to cart the damn things around the country and so on.
Now if I could just get someone in the government to make unsolicited junk mail illegal, make those little pull out, fill out and mail in cards in magazines illegal and make it so the only way you get a phone book is if you call and request one then Id be happy instead of them dropping off 3lbs of trees on everyone porch whether they want one or not a couple times a year.
One flood or fire at your house and those books will be gone. Wikipedia is backed up in countless places and can always be transferred to a new form of storage technology.
I bought an app for my iPod touch that is an 'offline' version of Wikipedia. I don't fancy paying $50+ a month since I hardly ever call anybody on the phone, so I don't carry an 'online' anything in my pocket for every day.
I find it somewhat useful as a quick reference, but one of the things I sometimes do when I'm bored and have a few minutes to waste is use the 'random article' button on the app.
There are far, far too many instances where what it pulls up is an individual Album Title for a contemporary rawk band I have never heard of, or arcana about some form of Anime. Based on my random sampling, at least 20% of the thing is that kind of stuff. Trivia that doesn't matter to anybody but the kind of geeks who hang out online.
On one hand, I am really sad about this. On the other hand... As Douglas Adams said in "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy": In many of the more relaxed civilizations on the Outer Eastern Rim of the Galaxy, the Hitchhiker's Guide has already supplanted the great Encyclopaedia Galactica as the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom, for though it has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate, it scores over the older, more pedestrian work in two important respects. First, it is slightly cheaper; and secondly it has the words DON'T PANIC inscribed in large friendly letters on its cover.
Yeah I got that $4700 boss stereo and a pile of cables for $20, the new headphones from costco costed more! OLD SCHOOL LIVES! And now how much for the books now, great books here, little crayon damage do I hear $50 now about it now 50, 50, 50 I got 55, 55, 60, now these are great 1954 books only the small blue and yellow crayon o the back now 70, 80, 85, 80 sold 80. How about this doom ][ cd with flooppy and code. how much now lets see look at that cool art on the cover BFG's okay starting at $50, do I hear 50 50 50 50 50 51 50 okay 60. .
There's a lot of bravado about how the web fills all their needs but I hate to point out the web in it's current form is younger than most of the people posting here. Britannica is older than the country. I've already found many web sites over the last 15 or so years vanishing and they were my sole source of some information so there's an impermanence to all web based and even computer based information. I can pick up and read one of the first editions of Britannica today. The only issue would be they'd be too valuable to read. There's already debate about how long the current form of the web will survive. Sources like iTunes are fussy about what they'll accept. We've built a house of cards and we all should be afraid. People boasted about bandwidth increases and unlimited data but the movement has been in the opposite direction. Still most of the country lacks high speed internet and the rest faces caps. I'm sorry but Wikipedia is not the same. I use it all the time but it has always been a shadow of the old encyclopedias. It wins out on volume of articles but I'd still rather thumb through and old encyclopedias. I grew up doing that very thing.
This scifi attitude of it'll just keep getting better doesn't reflect reality. Already country's and people's budgets are tightening and everyone is facing massive debts that need to be paid, got no debt? The national debt would beg to differ. The point is how much longer will society be able to aford iPads and even desktops which some are already viewing as antique. Many libraries no longer have books. If you loose access to high speed internet, and many people have no internet access, you are cut off. We aren't facing a golden age of information we are facing a rationing of information.
In fairness, some of the stranger topics on Wikipedia have text lifted verbatim from ancient out-of-copyright Britannica (and suitably credited). There's a message for the copyright debate, right there.
There will be no paper records left of our knowledge. I can see people trying to play these shiny round "seedy-rom" things using a needle "I'm sure there's knowledge encoded on this thing - try playing it backwards!"
At least until somebody figures out how to build a wind generator to power their laptop, printer, and 1TB hard drive full of ebooks.
now granted, , its a very tiny subset that is censored, and it typically revolves around crap like decryption codes.
Or political views, or religion, or anything touching it
I think you meant Wikipedia, and yes, it's garbage.
Doesn't get what, exactly? You are saying that a teacher who doesn't allow Wikipedia citations "doesn't get it"?
I think I'll side with the guy who's making the most sense.
The arguments that occur over such things as citations ("you CAN cite $FOO!" "no you CAN'T!") have always struck me as moronic anyhow. The one and only question one should ask oneself before citing a source, is, "Is this source CREDIBLE?" If the answer is no........don't cite it! It's that simple. Brittanica IS a credible source. Wikipedia is NOT. This is why we don't cite Wikipedia.
You typically wouldn't cite things that are common knowledge, no, but just because something is in Brittanica doesn't make it common knowledge, even to other self-described experts. How many of those folks do you know who've read the encyclopedia cover to cover? Take your audience into account when writing anything, including research papers.
To a starving African, it's a Swedish buffet.
It's just one of 233,921 search results
I would never have looked up the "Smothers Brothers" today if it weren't for Wikipedia
Yeah, and I would have never taken Highway 11 today if there wasn't a wreck on 59.
You think so, until your legs get blown off by a falsely marked mine and you're laying on the ground screaming in agony. Then you will curse the day you got your minefield map off Wikipedia.
Posted like a truly arrogant person who clearly has ZERO understanding (just like the rest of those responsible for Wikipedia) about usability.
I frequently use the web for research and Wikipedia is my auxilliary brain of choice, so I'm by no means a Luddite. However, I think this is very sad news - a processed tree carcass, especially something like a set of Encyclopdiae, is a truly beautiful thing
Interestingly for the nostalgic amongst us, creation.com today released a story about the first edition of Britannica, published 1771, which speaks of Noah's flood as having covered the globe (with an illustration) and suggests a creation date of around 4007BC.
Imagine living back when these things were part of the mainstream understanding of world history.
Censorship is the opposite of education. If neo-darwinism were defensible, people would not need to try and censor ID.
I wouldn't mind having the entire set nicely as EPUB's on my e-reader. That'd be something I'd pay a reasonable amount for...do they have it?
Ditto for Wikipedia, btw...for offline access.
You are not running the latest version of Foxfire, upgrade now to version 3.0. Hold on, we jumped to 9. Wait, it's 10. Wait, it's at 11. Oh, we just went to 12.
"Historians are at a loss to explain the demise of the first pan-human civilisation, as although they agree that the populous dwindled and went almost extinct at around AD 3500, there seems to be no surviving written historical records that can be dated any later than circa AD 2000."
"It can only be assumed that around this time, that there was a sudden uptake of illiteracy, maybe caused by a new religion or global-governmental policy. There are surviving references to an organisation or group known as the Inter Nets. We can only guess at what this actually was, but the commonly accepted theory is that it was actually some type of wearable mesh harness that prevented humans of this era from actually writing anything down."
Read More: http://www.mattowen.net/2012/03/the-importance-of-information-preservation
Together, We Can Make Slashdot Better. I Do NOT Mod ACs. - Check Me Out
They were writing them in ancient Greece and Rome.
There, I said it!
Books SUCK. (Lookie there, I said it again)
They're fragile, they're heavy, they kill trees, they're succeptible to water damage, they burn easily... and as impressive as they may look on a book shelf, they're a deterrent to any friend you would ever ask to help you at moving time.
You know how people 'outgrow' their homes (besides having children of course)? They accumulate too much STUFF. You know what much of that STUFF is? Books!
SAVE A TREE, HELP THE PLANET, TRUST THE CLOUD... :-)
Are you functionally retarded, or where you just born hydrocephalic?
What an asshole. I love how, in the course of your flaming rant, you took the time to correctly spell "hydrocephalic" yet totally misspelled "were." Perhaps you suffer from a similar affliction yourself.
Evolution is a lie.
Global warming is a lie.
The holocaust is a lie.
Sadam had WMD.
Smoking does not cause cancer.
The world is flat.
Stay tuned for Volume 2.
A pox on web designers who feel that window.innerWidth == screen.availWidth
My childhood would not have been the same without the set my parents had (and still have... and still use). I have young children about to enter school and always planned on buying a set of encyclopedias... so I just did. Truly, I wouldn't have been able to satiate my lust for knowledge in my younger years without such books. Sure, the internet is such a great great resource now, but I don't want my kids or myself to be so reliant on one technology. I remember reading via Slashdot an article about how paper is one of the best ways to keep information preserved for hundreds or even a thousand plus years. I'm betting on tried and true, because who knows how long Wikipedia will survive with things like SOPA flying around... and who knows how long computers will exist in a format conducive to research. Maybe in 25 years 99% of computers will be tiny hand held devices and "research" will be "Hey Siri-duplicate, what's a frog?" and your phone tells you "It's a small usually green animal that went extinct a long time ago- who cares, buy more stuff that is green like this new car!".
I've always meant to buy a set for my kids who are about to enter school. I read encyclopedias growing up more than any other type of book, and if it wouldn't have been for them I don't know what I would have done. So now's the time... I just ordered a set. Some things will get outdated, but the interest it will stir in my children will be so worth the cost to me. I silently thank my tightwad parents for at least buying a set of encyclopedias if not much else during my childhood! I can at least pass that on to my kids. I am really sad these things are going extinct. Damn.
We have a lot of complaining here about the nostalgia of flipping through the encyclopedia, but consider just how amazing the information revolution we are a part of is. Before, the quality of printed encyclopedias on most subjects was pretty high, but they were very expensive, and only published in limited languages. If you were lucky enough to grow up in a family able and willing to spend $1400 on books, or be near a library with one and have time to go there, then you have a great information source. Everyone else is just kind of boned.
Now, anyone with access to some sort of computer with an internet connection can access an incredible and unprecedented amount of knowledge and information, all more up to date and in more languages than any set of books. What will the next generation do with all of this knowledge at it's fingertips? Stick around, and we'll find out. The golden age is right now.
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I was reading World Book from 1960s from a previous house owner. It was interesting to read and see its old drawings on ants. ;)
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).