By JULIE BOSMAN
After 244 years, the Encyclopaedia Britannica is going out of print.
Those coolly authoritative, gold-lettered reference books that were once sold door-to-door by a fleet of traveling salesmen and displayed as proud fixtures in American homes will be discontinued, company executives said.
In an acknowledgment of the realities of the digital age — and of competition from the Web site Wikipedia — Encyclopaedia Britannica will focus primarily on its online encyclopedias and educational curriculum for schools. The last print version is the 32-volume 2010 edition, which weighs 129 pounds and includes new entries on global warming and the Human Genome Project.
“It’s a rite of passage in this new era,” Jorge Cauz, the president of Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc., a company based in Chicago, said in an interview. “Some people will feel sad about it and nostalgic about it. But we have a better tool now. The Web site is continuously updated, it’s much more expansive and it has multimedia.”
In the 1950s, having the Encyclopaedia Britannica on the bookshelf was akin to a station wagon in the garage or a black-and-white Zenith in the den, a possession coveted for its usefulness and as a goalpost for an aspirational middle class. Buying a set was often a financial stretch, and many families had to pay for it in monthly installments.
But in recent years, print reference books have been almost completely overtaken by the Internet and its vast spread of resources, including specialized Web sites and the hugely popular — and free — online encyclopedia Wikipedia.
MORE: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/13/after-244-years-encyclopaedia-britannica-stops-the-presses/
Editors Note: From Brenna Corbitt, Librarian at Yocum Library
I am very thankful I grew up in a non-digital age. While I certainly love the
fact that I can research Danish church registers online, for example, it does
not match the magic of laying down on the carpet in front of that old bookshelf
that look liked something my great grandparents had and grabbing one of those
massive volumes from the shelf (I was little at the time) and looking at those
color plates of the flags of the world or those black and white photos of
peoples and places from other lands. Those volumes had a smell of their own,
too. One of those volumes marked C had pressed four-leaf clovers on the page
marked clover that my dad and grandfather once picked. You won't find that
history on laptop, and they never last long enough to have a history.
Brenna
