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Wikipedia Didn't Kill Brittanica — Encarta Did
rudy_wayne writes "The end of Encyclopedia Britannica has been widely reported and its demise has been blamed on Wikipedia. However, this article at Wired points out that the real reason is something entirely different. 'In 1990 Britannica had $650 million in revenue. In 1996, long before Wikipedia existed, it was bankrupt and the entire company was sold for $135 million. What happened in between was Encarta. Even though Encarta didn't make money for Microsoft and Britannica produced its own encyclopedia CDs, Encarta was an inexpensive, multimedia encyclopedia that helped Microsoft sell Windows PCs to families. And once you had a PC in the living room or den where the encyclopedia used to be, it was all over for Mighty Britannica. It's not that Encarta made knowledge cheaper, it's that technology supplanted its role as a purchasable 'edge' for over-anxious parents. They bought junior a new PC instead of a Britannica. When Wikipedia emerged five years later, Britannica was already a weakened giant. It wasn't a free and open encyclopedia that defeated its print edition. It was the personal computer itself.'"
I remember being at a trade fair of some sort shortly after Encarta came out. I had a copy and immediately saw that multimedia versions would eventually kill the paper version.
So I asked the Brittanica rep when they would have their electronic version out, and the attitude was literaly "its a passing fad, people we will always want the book version".
I think that phrase "its a passing fad" should almost qualify as investment advice. take a hard look at the passing fads, and buy in early! or even better, short the company that claims their threat is a passing fad.
I doubt this. Encarta wasn't all that useful to me when it could have been. I still went to paper encyclopedias or used search engines. Now wikipedia has replaced both avenues. But Encarta wasn't even on the list. I looked at it a few times and couldn't take ti seriously as a resource.
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And it's nice to see that the "editor" managed to correct one of the misspellings of "Britannica" in the summary.
I would argue that Encarta, rather than supplanting encylopedia's in people's houses showed how unnecessary they are (which was confirmed by Wikipedia).
I confess to buying a couple of copies of Encarta, looking through them and seeing that they were okay - not as good as a set of Encyclopedia Britannica but you could toodle around and look up stuff. But, I was always disappointed in Encarta's depth of information as well as the limited pictures and videos (which were why you were supposed to buy the darn thing in the first place). So, it fell into disuse pretty quickly and the kids used the library for their projects (which is arguably where they should have been doing it in the first place). People got out of the habit of looking to an encyclopedia in the home.
Then along came Wikipedia which really fulfills the promise of a computer based encylopedia with links to images, videos, references you could cite/confirm, etc. which reduced an encyclopedia's usefulness to just being raw materials for quirky leather bound furniture.
myke
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
I tried to by Britannica CD in 90s. They were charging almost as much as paper edition. It was only in early 2000s when they realized the error of their ways.
They could have sewn up the encyclopedia market but their high price was unjustifiable in the light of substantially cheaper offerings such as Encarta.
Sure, Encarta is not as good as Britannica but it's good enough for most kids. This is the key point: good enough is the enemy of perfect.
Encarta was crap, Wikipedia is a phenomenal source of information and I routinely donate to support Wikipedia.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
I remember being a kid begging my parents to Brittanica only to hear over and over again that they couldn't afford it.
Not for mom and pop. There was no useful information on the web until later in the 90's, and no advertising of website URLs on TV or print media until at least 1996. Encarta and other information CDs were the bee's knees back then, because a lot of people never bothered with Internet access.
In 1993 computers were still disgustingly expensive ($2000+ with a monitor), and that was for a 386 that would choke on anything but text pages (in terms of online rendering). Modems were still incredibly slow and internet providers outside academia were incredibly hard to come by (most people used AOL). In this time period people were mostly buying computers, recognizing that they couldn't do anything fun without upgrading to a CD-ROM and a sound card, and upgrading with a Multimedia kit and playing The Seventh Guest and mucking around on Encarta (included in most upgrade kits).
You're thinking of the time frame of 1996 onwards, when people actually had more powerful processors to choose from (486 or Pentium-based PCs), faster modems became inexpensive (14.4 and faster), and real consumer internet providers began to surface.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
I was acquainted with some people at Britannica in the 80s and 90s, and others in publishing (not well enough acquainted to be a leak, just to form an opinion that might have value). It seemed to me that Britannica was stuck on being the encyclopedia that everyone wished they could afford, rather than the encyclopedia that everyone used. Similar things happened in other domains where the effective price point changed suddenly. You go from being the dominant choice in a small but expensive market to being almost nobody's choice in a much larger and much cheaper market.
I think that it's the same phenomenon that killed Apollo. They had the best (pretty much only) desktop research computer workstation, only affordable by very well funded labs. SUN Microsystems offered a much cheaper, inferior box, running a UNIX that was not yet as well engineered as the Apollo proprietary system. But the new, cheaper box, and the preponderance of UNIX on research minicomputers, provided a UNIX solution for almost everybody. Soon, even those who could afford Apollo found it more effective to buy lots of UNIX instead of a little bit of Apollo. I remember an almost tearful Apollo engineer, toward the end, promising that they were finally going to provide UNIX and cut their price. It was too late.
Mike O'Donnell http://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~odonnell/
By 10th grade we weren't allowed to cite encyclopedias ... had to have Primary Sources.
Not to mention anybody that has a family knows what REALLY killed them...assraping prices on the damned books, THAT is what killed them! It was just nuts what they wanted for those things, IIRC they were like $1700+ in the mid 90s. my sis asked "Should i buy these for the boys?" and I told her not no but HELL no, that with search engines and online resources it would be a waste as things will only get better while those will only get more out of date. Turned out that was the smart move as those researching skills sure come in handy for the oldest now that he is premed, in fact he gets extra credit as a TA helping those that learned to use encyclopedias how to research online in their remedial computer course.
If they would have lowered their prices or offered different models, the fancier bindings and style for libraries and schools and a more plain version for families maybe they'd still be around but instead they gouged for every cent they could right up until the end.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Actually, the best bet nowdays seems to be typing a word the way you think it's spelled in as a Google search. They'll generally correct it for you; for instance typing "numonya" brings a prompt for "pneumonia." The old "look it up in the dictionary" doesn't work unless you already have a pretty good idea of how the word is spelled.
Incorrect.
Wikipedia NOR Britannica are citable sources. EVER. Nor any other encyclopedia. They may be citable in grade school, but not once you get to university.
It's always been that way, and it affects all encyclopedias and Wikipedia equally. It does not matter at all if Britannica verified everything.
Encyclopedias are not primary sources. They never have, and never will, be citable.
The whole point of an encyclopedia is to gain knowledge in a general sense. If you know little about a subject, an encyclopedia works great because it gives you background information to begin your hunt. Even better, it's got a references section that helps direct you to the primary sources to which you can look up the information and get a deeper understanding. And THOSE sources are citable.
The same goes for Wikipedia. Ignoring errors and edit wars, Wikipedia will never be a primary source (and they aim not to be, either - no original research). Wikipedia's got an advantage over Britannica in that it has a lot of pop-culture articles and thus is more useful.
The quickest way to get laughed out of higher education is to cite an encyclopedia. Britannica, Encarta, Wikipedia, it doesn't matter. It doesn't even matter who's an authority figure. When you're doing research, they're excellent starting points because they cover the general background and have the much-needed reference section of every article to launch your research.
Actually, the best bet nowdays seems to be typing a word the way you think it's spelled in as a Google search. They'll generally correct it for you; for instance typing "numonya" brings a prompt for "pneumonia." The old "look it up in the dictionary" doesn't work unless you already have a pretty good idea of how the word is spelled.
Yep. That's why tagged the article "websearchkilledit". Not specifically Google, as Google wasn't there at the beginning, but web search in general made Britannica obsolete. The web, then the ability to search a repository or index of it. Altavista? Trying to remember the first big web search site...
Itâ(TM)s easy to see Brittanica going web-only as a story of âoeWikipedia wins, because open beats closed,â ...
Yeah, but it does apply to this story. Except it's Encarta that Wikipedia killed rather than Britannica. As the authors point out, Wikipedia couldn't have killed Britannica, because (print) Britannica went bankrupt five years before Wikipedia was born. The current Britannica isn't the same company.
Encarta was a more subtle case of this phenomenon, though. It really died because it cost money and only ran on one platform. If you already had a Windows box, you might spring for the $100 that Encarta cost, because it was a pretty good product. But once Wikipedia got going, by 2005 or so, Encarta was facing a competitor that was free in both the "free beer" and the "free speech" sense, and accessible from any browser. Wikipedia was rapidly becoming the most comprehensive encyclopedia in the world, it could be used from any kind of computer (and now from our cell phones), and it cost nothing to use over the cost of your computer and your Internet access. Also, if you found an error or important omission, you could fix it.
How could a private, proprietary package compete with that? Microsoft wasn't about to open Encarta and let just any idiot edit it (and it probably would have been a disaster if they had, considering all their enemies ;-).
Yes, "open" was only a part of the story. But Wikipedia's openness is what made them the biggest player in the game, since it gave them a million or so (unpaid) contributors. It's also part of what has kept their quality at roughly the same level as the proprietary encyclopedias, since they are inherently subject to vandalism along with editing by dummies. It's been interesting to see them do well enough to match the business world's best error rates despite this.
It does seem that the inherent accuracy of encyclopedias has a limit, presumably because they're edited by humans. Given this, it's probably no surprise that the one that's biggest, instantly accessible anywhere, and free would turn out to be the winner. But when Wikipedia started, we didn't know that it would match the quality level of the "professionally" produced products.
(And I suspect that the "instantly accessible everywhere" is the main reason that Wikipedia has done so well. If Britannica or Encarta had had that feature, Wikipedia may have never come into existence. Or maybe it would have; we'll never know, because all its competitors were behind paywalls.)
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.