81–90 of 142 posts
Well damn. Now I feel I need to go out and buy a copy, so I don't get sent all the way back to the stone age in the event of a massive solar flare or nuclear war or zombie apocalypse.
Back in the day, it was a great product. My family had an edition endorsed (in the first pages) by Queen Elizabeth II and Richard Nixon, and I can't calculate how many hours I spent leafing through the pages. I guess that's been replaced by Wikipedia's "Random article" link, but with EB you never got crap about Pokemon.
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/1493458/Pokemon
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Citable facts published by someone reputable are extremely important. Wikipedia is very much not that. britannica.com could very well be a citation for a wikipedia article but never the other way around.
Fail at step 1 because I cannot even get to the site (and more importantly, neither can Google), because Britannica does not understand how the web works ... 11 years after the web ate their expensive lunch meetings, they still don't get the web.
They have interesting robots.txt, though:
http://www.britannica.com/robots.txt
I would recommend them to hire a web designer.
It's weird, but I kinda wouldn't mind having a set of the last Encyclopaedia Britannica. The zenith of 244 years of tradition, an emblem of the transition of our knowledge to an online space, and still very functional in a quaint way...
Yep, there goes $1500~
We've talked about picking up an encyclopedia before... this kicked it into existence.
I recall reading a story (couldn't find it just now) about how Bill Gates tried unsuccessfully to license the Britannica content to create his digital encyclopedia product. Instead, Microsoft cobbled together assets themselves and built Encarta (1993). Microsoft proceeded to trounce the print Encyclopedia business by creating a better product that severely undercut the traditional players. Here we are, 2012, finally…
I was extremely amazed how entire encyclopedia full of content with pictures, sounds and charts that I could most likely never read from start to end can fit into one single disc of a palm size.
History goes on... can you actually imagine in next 250 years what will replace Wikipedia? Imagine this: "After 250 years, Wikipedia shuts down its remaining servers due to lack of traffic".
It is easy to disparage the Encyclopedia Britannica from a modern perspective - out-of-step, overpriced, outmaneuvered by competitors - but there is a great sadness here at the demise of something that represented an effort by western scholars to "capture the world's knowledge." Imagine assembling a "A" team of scholars and scientists, getting them to make substantial, substantive contributions in each of their respe…
"Let's make a big book with all the stuff in it so people don't have to buy a whole bunch of books." Old people were hilarious.
I recall reading a story (couldn't find it just now) about how Bill Gates tried unsuccessfully to license the Britannica content to create his digital encyclopedia product. Instead, Microsoft cobbled together assets themselves and built Encarta (1993). Microsoft proceeded to trounce the print Encyclopedia business by creating a better product that severely undercut the traditional players. Here we are, 2012, finally…
I read in a book ("Blown to Bits") that one of the reasons why Brittanica flopped was because the sales people did not understand what they were selling. They thought that what they were selling was knowledge.
But most of the customers bought the books to assuage parental guilt, that they were doing enough by their children. Once the computer came around people stopped buying encyclopedia's so that "Johnny would do well in school," and bought computers instead.
Encyclopedia Brittanica did end up becoming a victim of changing technology, but in the short term at least, not in the direct way as is assumed.