Encyclopedia Britannica Stops the Presses

Kaylee

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From an op-ed at CNN:

The world received word yesterday that the publishers of Encyclopedia Britannica would stop producing hardbound, paper copies of their venerable reference.
Actually, they stopped in 2010 but didn't tell anyone. Now they've disclosed they've been able to sell just 8,000 copies of the collection. The rest are in a warehouse in Chicago, looking for someone who needs historically accurate, out-of-date information.

According to the company, they'll continue publishing online and will sell their services to individuals, schools and libraries.

<snip>

Wikipedia has largely replaced those printed volumes, principally because it's free. Everything on the Web is free (or should be, according to its most passionate users). The fact that it's not written, edited, or monitored by content matter experts seems to be of little concern. Crowd-sourcing has replaced experts and, though not good, the accuracy quotient of Wikipedia articles seems to be improving.

<snip>

Newspapers and magazines are in decline, bloggers and content aggregators are on the ascendant. The problem with crowd-sourcing the answer to any particular question is, of course, that you're as likely to find ideologically driven opinion as hard fact. You also have little in the way of support for judgments about credibility, reliability, and accuracy.
<snip>

The disappearance of our printed sources of information poses two serious concerns. First, our antiquated, overtaxed, patchwork power grid is perennially on the verge of collapse. Chinese hackers, aging components, or an F4 tornado could take down large segments of our power supply. No power, no Internet.

Second, just two-thirds of all Americans have access to the Internet at work or home. Those of us who live with an iPhone, Blackberry, tablet device (or a desktop computer) seem to think just about everyone is connected. Not so. Online access is far from a given for lower-income people. Wireless handheld devices and municipal WiFi systems look promising, but more than 100 million Americans are not connected to the Internet, according to the Pew Research Center's Internet and American Life Project.

Clearly this is a hinge point in history, much like Gutenberg's use of moveable type to operate a printing press, or Marconi's use of wireless communication to transmit the human voice over vast distances.

In the interim,

<snip>

, or we could do something important for that one-third of our neighbors that will serve as an information safety net: Support your local public library. They, too, offer access to the Internet, but they also offer a clean, safe, nicely organized source for each of us to find information that's useful, valuable, interesting, and helpful.

Looking forward to the world our children and their children will live in doesn't mean simply abandoning technology that seems anachronistic. It means preserving the best of what we know and making it accessible to everyone.
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I'm not surprised but I admit that the decision makes me feel a little uneasy. I agree with CNN that the internet, while a powerful tool, is in some ways a fragile medium.

Personally speaking -- I always have access to my books but I still occassionally lose access to the internet for various reason.

What do you all think?
 
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Soooo the one third of Americans who do not have access to the internet can afford a set of Britannica?
 
I'm bothered for the same reasons outlined above: Wikipedia is too fragile, too easily tampered with. Witness what happened on entries regarding certain figures, including Werner Erhardt, who had any mention of his pedophilia stricken, even though it was noted voluntarily by his daughter to Ed Bradley on Sixty Minutes.

Then consider what happens should the web fail, or as we saw with recent protests. No thanks, I'd like the Britannica to continue to publish.
 
Are we talking strictly about paper versions? That is, can you still get a version of the encyclopedia on a DVD?
 
Roadtoad said:
I'm bothered for the same reasons outlined above: Wikipedia is too fragile, too easily tampered with. Witness what happened on entries regarding certain figures, including Werner Erhardt, who had any mention of his pedophilia stricken, even though it was noted voluntarily by his daughter to Ed Bradley on Sixty Minutes.
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It looks like mention of it is back in, or at least mention of the allegations. But I see your point and I agree.

I also agree with CNN that crowd sourcing has unique problems that other credible sources of information don't have.

Then consider what happens should the web fail, or as we saw with recent protests. No thanks, I'd like the Britannica to continue to publish.
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I assume you mean that you'd like the BE to continue publishing hardback copies.

I agree. As acessible as the web is to many people -- in essence each web page can be viewed as only one copy* -- and that is a weak point.

It's true that the Way Back Machine exists -- but it is only one organization. I also don't know how it decides which web pages to archive and a quick glance at Wikipedia says that there has been legal disputes over their efforts.
At any rate I'm sure it's no contest as to how much information the Way Back Machine has stored compared to how much information is stored in the form of books in various homes, libraries, schools and other institutions throughout the world.

Don't get me wrong -- I strongly prefer life after the Internet than before the Internet. It is much easier to distribute information now than say even 25 years ago and definitely 50 years ago. And basically almost anyone that can purchase a domain name and type can set up a web site. Even though there's a lot more chaff than wheat on the net, I think that's great.

But I also think it will be more of a challenge to preserve information going forward especially as e-printing becomes even more common. A hard copy is easy to access. The platform for e-copies are always changing and it takes more time, thought and pro-active planning to preserve information originally recorded in one of those formats and to continuously keep it accessible in the e-formats that are constantly replacing each other.
 
A sad day in many ways. Much of my childhood was spent flicking through (oldish) volumes of the EB. I never thought I would live to see its demise. Online encyclopedias simply don't have the same appeal.
 
I dread the day that publishing hard copies goes the way of the Dodo.

One big Electro Magnetic Pulse and it will all be gone...
 
Brainache said:
I dread the day that publishing hard copies goes the way of the Dodo.

One big Electro Magnetic Pulse and it will all be gone...
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I've read some good dystopias that featured the impact of an EMP -- but that was one problem none of them dealt with. Time for someone to write a new book! Heh, will probably be an e-book.

Or imagine an Orwellian future with hardbacks prohibited and every e-book edited wirelessly after a regime change ...


But seriously, what steps could we take as a society to make our corpora able to withstand and survive the vagrancies of technology, human error and human oversight? Can we come up with systems that would allow as many e-books to survive the centuries and even millenia as older writings have in the form of etchings on stone, leather scrolls and hard back books?
 
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MG1962 said:
Oh wait, cant you get internet access at librarys as well?
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I suppose this varies by city or even by library -- but AFAIK in New York City it's problematic. Typically one has to reserve the time and is limited to a maximum of 45 mins a day. *

Let's say we are talking about a student -- most would probably be better off having access to hard copies because the books don't have the same time limitation. I think most students would have a lot of trouble managing to research a paper with a 45 min maximum time limitation per day.

Anyway, that is only one of the issues that is brought up in the article linked in the OP. What is your opinion about the other issues?



* And of course one has to be registered with the library system.
 
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Kaylee said:
Anyway, that is only one of the issues that is brought up in the article linked in the OP. What is your opinion about the other issues?
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Well my first point would be that the Pew Institute doesn't seem to suggest 100 million Americans dont have access to the internet

http://www.pewinternet.org/Static-Pages/Trend-Data/Whos-Online.aspx

The fact Brittanica has been moving to online and DVD production since 1996 really means not much has changed except the media caught up with the story.

If the internet ceases to exist tomorrow we just go back to life in the 1970's Newspapers are back in business Brittanica rolls the presses again and annoying door to door salesmen re-appear trying to flog a set of books no one could ever really afford, or could have spent money buying better reference books to begin with
 
MG1962 said:
...
If the internet ceases to exist tomorrow we just go back to life in the 1970's Newspapers are back in business Brittanica rolls the presses again and annoying door to door salesmen re-appear trying to flog a set of books no one could ever really afford, or could have spent money buying better reference books to begin with
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I'm more worried about what might happen if the internet ceases to exist 50 or 100 years from now, when there's no one left who remembers how to roll the presses.
 
Brainache said:
I'm more worried about what might happen if the internet ceases to exist 50 or 100 years from now, when there's no one left who remembers how to roll the presses.
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Well we will still have the bible - so we should be okay
 
Kaylee said:
But seriously, what steps could we take as a society to make our corpora able to withstand and survive the vagrancies of technology, human error and human oversight? Can we come up with systems that would allow as many e-books to survive the centuries and even millenia as older writings have in the form of etchings on stone, leather scrolls and hard back books?
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The Long Now Foundation has been experimenting with physical media that contain microetched text. It isn't electronic, but it does fit a lot of words in a small space.

Brainache said:
I'm more worried about what might happen if the internet ceases to exist 50 or 100 years from now, when there's no one left who remembers how to roll the presses.
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No problem! They could just look it up on the...um.... Uh, yeah.
 
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