After 244 years of publication in hardcover, Encyclopaedia Brittanica is going all online. The venerable publication’s final physical edition was its 2010 version.
While the company said it had to make this decision because the hardcover editions were not selling well it’s really sad to see the Encyclopaedia go out of print.
Yes, the online edition may make information more readily accessible (and purchasable) through the all-too-familiar online shopping carts instead of through the stereotypical door-to-door salesperson.
Not to mention the money Brittanica will likely save on paper and printing.
But not everybody liked Brittanica’s decision. Almost immediately after the company said it was discontinuing its print edition, copies of the $1,395 sets began flying off bookstore shelves. However, the company did not think these sales could possibly make up for a steady decline in hardcover sales which reached a peak about 20 years ago at 120,000 copies.
Some may argue that the days of hardcover book retailing are on the decline and that everything should be sold online now. This is definitely something book publishers have to wrestle with and became quite apparent when Borders Books went out of business last year.
But something is definitely lost when physical books disappear.
Very often, people need the physical pages of a book in front of them to think cogently and linearly. They also must be able to refer back to earlier pages, an activity made more difficult on computer screens.
And don’t a lot of people have to print out computer documents out in order to work with them intelligently?
In fact an attorney friend asserts that it’s much easier to work with law books in front of her even though she’s grudgingly learned to adapt to working with everything online.
It’s also worth noting that the mother of Associate U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor spent money she barely had to buy a set of Encyclopedias for Sonia and her brother Juan (now a doctor) when they were growing up in New York City’s South Bronx.
Of course, Celina Sotomayor bought them from a door-to-door salesman.
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