By the way, I own four complete editions of Britannica - the 1st edition from 1771, the 9th from the 1870's, the 11th from 1910-11, and the 1967 edition. The best of all is the 11th - a bit dated, but no other encyclopedia come close in terms of scholarly breadth. It's well worth getting if you come across it in a second hand bookshop.
It is sad that Encarta has put so much pressure on Britannica. The problem is that Encarta is based on a cheap little encyclopedia with almost no scholarly value compared with Britannica (the pricing difference is not outrageous when you consider the difference in quality), but with a few fancy pictures (and perhaps the limited attention spans of people these days...), no one seems to know the difference. I might add that the Encarta dictionary is a better piece of work, though not of unabridged scope. A lot of nervous dictionary editors take pot shots at it, but it is newly edited by respectable lexicographers and is not really that bad.
Having worked for the OED for ten years and developed the prototypes for the OED Online, I can confirm the sad fact that publishing companies are in no mood to give away their content and are, indeed, only reluctantly involved with the world wide web (the first suggested OED Online prototype was working and suggested in 1994, but it took them till 2000 to launch a version with reduced functionality...). Unfortunately, it is also true that it takes a lot of money and many hours of serious scholarly effort to produce a major reference work. I am happy to report, however, that I have put the entire 10 volume, 10,000 page Century Dictionary (considered by many to be the greatest American dictionary ever produced) freely online in DjVu format. For those who might be interested, the url is http://www.century-dictionary.com and it includes headword lookup and full text search capability.
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By the way, I own four complete editions of Britannica - the 1st edition from 1771, the 9th from the 1870's, the 11th from 1910-11, and the 1967 edition. The best of all is the 11th - a bit dated, but no other encyclopedia come close in terms of scholarly breadth. It's well worth getting if you come across it in a second hand bookshop.
It is sad that Encarta has put so much pressure on Britannica. The problem is that Encarta is based on a cheap little encyclopedia with almost no scholarly value compared with Britannica (the pricing difference is not outrageous when you consider the difference in quality), but with a few fancy pictures (and perhaps the limited attention spans of people these days...), no one seems to know the difference. I might add that the Encarta dictionary is a better piece of work, though not of unabridged scope. A lot of nervous dictionary editors take pot shots at it, but it is newly edited by respectable lexicographers and is not really that bad.
Having worked for the OED for ten years and developed the prototypes for the OED Online, I can confirm the sad fact that publishing companies are in no mood to give away their content and are, indeed, only reluctantly involved with the world wide web (the first suggested OED Online prototype was working and suggested in 1994, but it took them till 2000 to launch a version with reduced functionality...). Unfortunately, it is also true that it takes a lot of money and many hours of serious scholarly effort to produce a major reference work. I am happy to report, however, that I have put the entire 10 volume, 10,000 page Century Dictionary (considered by many to be the greatest American dictionary ever produced) freely online in DjVu format. For those who might be interested, the url is http://www.century-dictionary.com and it includes headword lookup and full text search capability.