After 244 Years, Encyclopaedia Britannica Stops the Presses • Hacker News Board

Re: After 244 Years, Encyclopaedia Britannica Stops the Presses

#131

Post by joering2 » Wed, Mar 14, 2012, 2:14 PM UTC

beza1e1 wrote: post #122

joering2 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recall Encarta as the first CD that came with my CD-ROM back then it was 2x read speed. 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 sh…

What will replace Wikipedia? Something which generates that data automatically from the "citations". I imagine Wolfram Alpha, Freebase, DBpedia, Cyc, TrueKnowledge and more all channeled into a single interface.

+1. did not know any of those.. learnt so much today trueknowledge is amazing, thanks!!

Re: After 244 Years, Encyclopaedia Britannica Stops the Presses

#132

Post by mseebach » Wed, Mar 14, 2012, 2:20 PM UTC

Helianthus wrote: post #3

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...

Slight nit-pick, but I doubt that the 2010 edition is the zenith. Not sure which is, but I would expect it to be from somewhere before the internet started making it redundant.

Re: After 244 Years, Encyclopaedia Britannica Stops the Presses

#133

Post by rootbear » Wed, Mar 14, 2012, 3:59 PM UTC

patrickgzill wrote: post #57

I recommend the 1968 or so, EB editions if you are looking for an older one. The 1972 or 1973 was the last of the classic style ones, after that they went with Micropedia/Macropedia etc. which is not what you want. The articles are well written, and if covering pre-20th century history, literature, or other topics, should still be excellent introductions.

I think the copy at my parents' house is about 1968. I remember when I was young and we got it. I guess I'll have to duke it out with my sister for who gets it!

Re: After 244 Years, Encyclopaedia Britannica Stops the Presses

#134

Post by dbecker » Wed, Mar 14, 2012, 4:43 PM UTC

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…

One of my friends had a housefire last year. Lost hundreds of books, letters, notes from old classes, you name it.

Not a single document from his gmail archive or dropbox folder was lost.

If I want to keep something safe, paper definitely isn't my preferred medium.

Re: After 244 Years, Encyclopaedia Britannica Stops the Presses

#135

Post by blahedo » Wed, Mar 14, 2012, 4:56 PM UTC

286c8cb04bda wrote: post #6

> Only 8,000 sets of the 2010 edition have been sold, and the remaining 4,000 have been stored in a warehouse until they can be purchased. I suspect it won't take them very long to sell those copies after this announcement.

I thought the same thing, and I'm a little surprised they didn't do a larger print run for the last edition.

Re: After 244 Years, Encyclopaedia Britannica Stops the Presses

#136

Post by dubya » Wed, Mar 14, 2012, 5:23 PM UTC

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…

The scenario where paper seems to have a serious advantage over digital is when people disappear or lose interest in maintaining digital copies for a few decades. Paper just sits, relatively inert, in libraries or boxes in peoples attics. Meanwhile, finding a reader for the Jazz disk with your thesis has become impossible.

Re: After 244 Years, Encyclopaedia Britannica Stops the Presses

#137

Post by pnathan » Wed, Mar 14, 2012, 6:29 PM UTC

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)

There was (is?) some software called PC Study Bible that did/does that.

Re: After 244 Years, Encyclopaedia Britannica Stops the Presses

#138

Post by aValidUserName » Wed, Mar 14, 2012, 9:37 PM UTC

kijin wrote: post #34

saryant wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random

Half the time, that leads to auto-generated stub articles about small towns in the middle of nowhere.

So just hit it again until it leads to something interesting.

Re: After 244 Years, Encyclopaedia Britannica Stops the Presses

#139

Post by moheeb » Wed, Mar 14, 2012, 10:52 PM UTC

DilipJ wrote: post #98

verelo wrote: post #82

Its sad to see, and in another way a little scary. I sure hope we have enough dinosaurs to burn to keep the Internet running. Long live "The Cloud".

I'm sure more carbon is being used in cutting down the trees to turn into paper, and then shipping all of that paper to customers.

Actually chainsaws are pretty efficient.

I say there is no way more "carbon" is used shipping a few thousand books than powering the entire internet.

Re: After 244 Years, Encyclopaedia Britannica Stops the Presses

#140

Post by pjscott » Wed, Mar 14, 2012, 11:41 PM UTC

dubya wrote: post #136

pjscott wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The scenario where paper seems to have a serious advantage over digital is when people disappear or lose interest in maintaining digital copies for a few decades. Paper just sits, relatively inert, in libraries or boxes in peoples attics. Meanwhile, finding a reader for the Jazz disk with your thesis has become impossible.

This is an argument for large-scale backups. If you're already maintaining around 100 TB of assorted backup data, the extra effort of preserving another megabyte of data is negligible, even if you don't consciously care about that particular megabyte.

My thesis is in Dropbox, and I emailed it to my GMail address. Both companies seem likely to faithfully back up my thesis for the indefinite future, because it would literally be more effort for them not to back it up. I also have it on a USB drive somewhere, but I forgot where I put it. Incidentally, I also made a printed copy, but I have no idea where it is.