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After 244 Years, the End For the Dead Tree Encyclopedia Britannica

Posted by Soulskill on from the your-encyclopedia-needn't-outweigh-you dept.

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."

22 of 373 comments (clear)

  1. The ultimate hipster edition by casings · · Score: 5, Insightful

    That actually sounds like a really "cool" thing to own.

    1. Re:The ultimate hipster edition by jhoegl · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Just wait until we live in the post energy Mad Max era of lack of knowledge.
      Why, if you owned those, you would be... GOD! Or a washed up singer in charge of some sort of barter town.

    2. Re:The ultimate hipster edition by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Is anyone else just a little bit sad about this news?

    3. Re:The ultimate hipster edition by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      "The Way Things Work" would be a more concise, possibly helpful resource -- albeit I only have an much older edition, which may in fact be more useful as it's mostly related to physical everyday things which could mostly be made using relatively primitive tools.

    4. Re:The ultimate hipster edition by bmo · · Score: 4, Insightful

      More useful in the Mad Max era would be Machinery's Handbook (one of the earlier editions without CNC) and maybe a set of Foxfire books.

      Those, a slide rule, and a set of log trig tables, and you'd be all set.

      It would be more portable too.

      --
      BMO

    5. Re:The ultimate hipster edition by Sniper98G · · Score: 4, Insightful

      $1,400 cool?

      http://store.britannica.com/products/ecm001en0

      This is not the death of the encyclopedia, just the ending of an inefficient costly format. Who goes to their site and ops for the $1,400 print version over the $30 disc version?

    6. Re:The ultimate hipster edition by Sez+Zero · · Score: 4, Insightful

      $1,400 cool?

      This is not the death of the encyclopedia, just the ending of an inefficient costly format. Who goes to their site and ops for the $1,400 print version over the $30 disc version?

      They also have an app for $1.99 a month. I could get the app for more than 58 years if I wanted to spend that much money. Plus I'd also get updated information and spread the cost out over 58 years.

      The dead tree edition makes no sense. Still, why do I feel like I want to go out and spend $1400?

  2. Losing A Snapshot Of History by djnanite · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?

    1. Re:Losing A Snapshot Of History by LordLucless · · Score: 4, Insightful

      It's all a question of how much that nostalgia was worth to you. And apparently, it wasn't worth $1500 a year to many people at all.

      --
      Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
    2. Re:Losing A Snapshot Of History by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Which begs the question : Why didn't the EB take the lead as the premiere on line reference resource? They had the pole position, they had the background process of collecting and cataloging the information, it would have been trivial to create an on line presence. Yet, they didn't. 244 years of diligence, flushed in a single decade. Wow. I guess it's true - having information isn't good enough, you have to know how to use it as well.

    3. Re:Losing A Snapshot Of History by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The "free world" standard for the 19th and 20th centuries, up to the transformation of social philosophy in the '80s, was truth.

      The "free world" standard today is verifiability: the more people tell a lie, the more it accepted. Many nations have had this standard in the past, but some countries (notably the UK and the US) have bravely held it back.

      Wikipedia's standard is one of verifiability, not truth, so its win over Britannica was inevitable.

    4. Re:Losing A Snapshot Of History by Daniel+Phillips · · Score: 4, Insightful

      This is quite sad.

      The passing of illuminated scrolls was also quite sad.

      --
      Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
    5. Re:Losing A Snapshot Of History by Darinbob · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Pets.com?

  3. Citable by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Insightful

    Wikipedia will actually be a useful reference when I can cite it in a paper without looking entirely foolish.

    1. Re:Citable by Pharmboy · · Score: 5, Insightful

      You will never be able to cite Wikipedia in a paper without looking foolish. It really isn't designed for that. You CAN use Wikipedia to get an understanding of a topic, and the references they use are usually pretty good and CAN be used as a cite without looking fooling.

      Wikipedia is a great tool, but it will never replace paper encyclopedias, by design. Then again, any paper that only cites encyclopedias (paper or otherwise) isn't a good paper. Even Wikipedia requires multiple sources, as should any good paper, for a balance of perspective and confirmation of key points.

      --
      Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
    2. Re:Citable by JoshuaZ · · Score: 4, Insightful

      A well-written Wikipedia article should include citations to the relevant statements. So, instead of citing Wikipedia, you can look up where the Wikipedia contributors got the information from and cite that. In some areas one doesn't even need to do that- the well written math articles generally contain proofs of the major claims in question, so you can verify the proofs yourself.

    3. Re:Citable by LordLucless · · Score: 3, Insightful

      If you were citing the Encyclopaedia Britannica, then your papers weren't worth much in the first place. Look up the citations on Wikipedia, read them, and cite those.

      --
      Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
    4. Re:Citable by betterunixthanunix · · Score: 3, Insightful

      You will never be able to cite Wikipedia in a paper without looking foolish.

      This is mainly due to the fact that there is no "stable" Wikipedia -- things change so quickly that citing Wikipedia makes it very difficult for anyone to actually look up whatever you were citing. If there were "snapshots" that were widely distributed, say at the end of each year, one could simply cite those snapshots.

      Paper encyclopedias are great for citing because they are frozen in time. They also contain errors that are hard to correct, out of date information that is hard to update, and searching them is not nearly as convenient as searching online encyclopedias. Wikipedia will win in the end because it can be updated and corrected so quickly, and because as you yourself noted, the ability to cite encyclopedias is not terribly important.

      --
      Palm trees and 8
    5. Re:Citable by MyLongNickName · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I grew up with the Encyclopedia Britannica. Apparently, though, your reading skills are poor. No, I wasn't steered wrong. The point isn't the quality of the encyclopedia, it is the fact that it IS an encyclopedia. It is not original work, and oughtn't be treated as if it were.

      Your insults are weak, misdirected and repetitve. You can't get a simple concept through your head and instead misconstrue it as if we are putting down the Encyclopedia Britannica. We are not. Encyclopedias should not be used as a reference source, only the sources they reference. If you yourself really read articles in the Encyclopedia, you would find they have quite a bit of cross reference. Unless you are a lazy researcher, which you certainly appear to be, you go to those sources, read the material for yourself and then write your paper referring to the original sources.

      You call me and the OP "fast fooders". You are the one who lazily reads an encyclopedia and then cites it as a source. Grow up. Learn to read, and argue the point being argued.

      --
      See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
  4. Obligatory XKCD by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    http://xkcd.com/978/

  5. endurance egghead pukes amplified ignorance by epine · · Score: 4, Insightful

    In short-- there's no wisdom in crowds, only amplified ignorance.

    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.

  6. The end of the book era by Animats · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.