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After 244 Years, Encyclopaedia Britannica Stops the Presses

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Re: After 244 Years, Encyclopaedia Britannica Stops the Presses

#111

Post by brazzy »

mnl wrote: post #106
nakkiel wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, download a dump of Wikipedia and be done with it. When you say "still around", you should know that digital bits have the potential to be around forever while paper books require a lot of efforts to keep around just a couple of decades. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preservation_%28library_and_arc... I have an encyclopedia that's now 120 (or so) at home and I don't read it anymore because I'm too affraid to dama…

Well, they have that potential as long as the copyright holders won't go out of business, consumers stop viewing content as disposable goods and hence keep copies... and the FBI stops closing sharing sites. Now seriously, you're wrong. I've got a book from 1640 and looks fine: as long as they're printed on acid free paper they should last for centuries. Check your digital media after two decades... Hard drives/floppi…

> CD/DVDs won't last that long because of decomposition of dye.

That's burned CD/DVDs. Pressed ones from the 1980s usually still work. Some early production runs had problems with the aluminum layer not being properly sealed and oxidizing, but they definitely have the potential to last many decades if Not centuries.

Re: After 244 Years, Encyclopaedia Britannica Stops the Presses

#112

Post by GigabyteCoin »

rhplus wrote: post #95
grellas wrote: post #31

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…

I think the most notable aspect of the 1911 edition - and every edition before and since - is that each is still around, distinct and readable. I don't yet know whether people will be able to reference a '2011 edition' of Wikipedia in a hundred years time. I'm aware of various archival projects, but unless they receive continued support, we could very easily be at risk of losing vast checkpoints in the history of hum…

Anybody in the world can download a fresh dump of wikipedia every second of every day.

I would think that many thousands of people are doing this every single day right now.

archive.org probably keeps almost a monthly archive on every wikipedia article that has ever existed.

Re: After 244 Years, Encyclopaedia Britannica Stops the Presses

#113

Post by nodata »

camiller wrote: post #97
yarone wrote: post #48

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…

One thing I remember about Encarta back when the Pentium 75mHz was king, If you copied a passage of text and pasted it into MS word, it automatically generated a footnote entry. To this day I've never seen any other software do that. (Not saying there isn't any, I've just not seen it)

and if you copy and pasted an image, it would appear black.

Re: After 244 Years, Encyclopaedia Britannica Stops the Presses

#114

Post by seclorum »

What a pity. I wonder if they'll return to publishing when it becomes cheaper to print iPad-like devices in the near future?

I personally believe that EB had a place in the world. For example, I'd happily pay a few thousand Euro's/$/Pounds for "the complete, historical Encyclopaedia Britannica" that contains every single release of EB back to the beginning. The context of historical discovery that would provide would be amazing.

Of course, it'd have to be digital.

(Disclaimer: I collect old dictionaries for the same reason: culture context as things change over the decades..)

Re: After 244 Years, Encyclopaedia Britannica Stops the Presses

#115

Post by mnl »

nakkiel wrote: post #107
mnl wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, they have that potential as long as the copyright holders won't go out of business, consumers stop viewing content as disposable goods and hence keep copies... and the FBI stops closing sharing sites. Now seriously, you're wrong. I've got a book from 1640 and looks fine: as long as they're printed on acid free paper they should last for centuries. Check your digital media after two decades... Hard drives/floppi…

No matter the quality of the paper, it will eventually decay. If you can still read your book from 1640 that's really great but realistically how common is that? There are a lot of environmental factors that affect paper duration and in many areas of the world, a decade is already very long for paper (have worked with an NGO based in Thailand that has 15 years of archives; the first 5 years are hardly readable) As I…

"My" book isn't particularly resilient, it's just the oldest one I've got at home. It was covered in mud, maybe that's why it was the only one not stolen from a very old family house of ours. After all that abuse, it still works, and as a passive device, has needed no energy to keep its contents for 370 years without any change in format or computing platform able to read it every other decade or so. Try any decent library, very old books use to be in the basement, you'd be amazed. It's a bit embarrassing having to remind you that at least before the 1990s people used old books. Most of the Archives have survived without any special care for centuries (this one is a great example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archivo_de_Indias). Of course, they didn't use toner neither chlorine bleached paper.

> We all know that paper is sensible (...)

"My point exactly".

Re: After 244 Years, Encyclopaedia Britannica Stops the Presses

#116

Post by [deleted] »

pjscott wrote: post #105
electromagnetic wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed history is gradual, but the thing that shocks me about this is that in 3,000 years when our successors look back, is this the period they're going to think our society ended? Is their society going to be digging through the buried remains of silicon valley and saying "their civilization seemed to disappear when they started mass producing these 3.5" and 2.5" boxes containing sheets of metal. It seems far fetch…

Redundancy is easier than ever. To use your example of Wikipedia, there are a few sites around the world that mirror the periodic data dumps from Wikipedia, and if you feel like donating about 7.7 GB to the preservation of history, there are torrents: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Data_dump_torrents On that note, this is probably the best general discussion I've seen of archiving our digital data: http://www.gwern.n…

[deleted]

Re: After 244 Years, Encyclopaedia Britannica Stops the Presses

#117

Post by vidarh »

nakkiel wrote: post #107
mnl wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, they have that potential as long as the copyright holders won't go out of business, consumers stop viewing content as disposable goods and hence keep copies... and the FBI stops closing sharing sites. Now seriously, you're wrong. I've got a book from 1640 and looks fine: as long as they're printed on acid free paper they should last for centuries. Check your digital media after two decades... Hard drives/floppi…

No matter the quality of the paper, it will eventually decay. If you can still read your book from 1640 that's really great but realistically how common is that? There are a lot of environmental factors that affect paper duration and in many areas of the world, a decade is already very long for paper (have worked with an NGO based in Thailand that has 15 years of archives; the first 5 years are hardly readable) As I…

Digital data has the potential, yes, but unless you take continuous action, it suffers from many of the same environmental factors that affects storage of paper, and it is far more prone to losing content from minor errors.

On another forum I follow, someone has spent weeks trying to piece together data from a single 880KB Amiga formatted floppy from 20 years ago...

The reality is that we are notoriously bad at safeguarding digital data. Tons of data has no real backups.

The potential doesn't help us when it doesn't match reality.

Re: After 244 Years, Encyclopaedia Britannica Stops the Presses

#118

Post by corin_ »

Domenic_S wrote: post #80
baddox wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cost of a 2 million dollar yacht may also be justified, but that still explains why not more than a few thousand are sold a year.

Low sales isn't interesting in itself -- the Golden Ring of retail is a low volume/immense markup business. 244 years of history should also hint at the fact that pricing isn't the issue.

No, it simply hints that pricing wasn't always an issue, not that it isn't an issue.

The quick way to find out is - if they could make a good profit selling the entire set for $x where $x The reason the price used to work and doesn't now is that digital equivilents are not only (subjectively) better/easier/etc. - they're also cheaper.

Re: After 244 Years, Encyclopaedia Britannica Stops the Presses

#119

Post by vidarh »

edwardy20 wrote: post #30
darrenkopp wrote: post #4

$1,400 to buy it in book form. That may be part of the reason it's not being printed anymore.

I wonder if selling the most popular Wikipedia articles in printed form for around $100 would have a market.

Search for wikipedia on amazon, and restrict the search to paperback books, and click past the first page or two, and you get an endless stream of books composed of Wikipedia entries.

Re: After 244 Years, Encyclopaedia Britannica Stops the Presses

#120

Post by vidarh »

tpowell wrote: post #11

How in the hell is this just now happening if ENCARTA was discontinued over three years ago? Seems like this should have taken place ten years ago or more.

8000 sold in 2010 at $1395 is more than $11 million in revenue. Even if the cost is high, presumably they still made a profit on it until quite recently too since they kept printing them.
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