Where is encyclopaedia britannica published

In fact, our employees held a party the day of the announcement, celebrating the fact that Britannica was still a growing and viable company.

They ate the print set—in the form of a cake that pictured the volume, pound encyclopedia. They displayed silver balloons—one for each year the encyclopedia had been in print. They toasted the departure of an old friend with champagne and the dawning of a new era with determination.

We had known for some time that this day was coming. Given how little revenue the print set generated, and given that we had long ago shifted to a digital-first editorial process, the bound volumes had become a distraction and a chore to put together. The reaction to our announcement was interesting and varied. Some people were shocked. Please, come back! But although most people seemed to know what was happening, some misunderstood.

In fact, the internet enabled us to reinvent ourselves and open new channels of business. Reports cited Wikipedia as a disruptive force. In fact, Wikipedia helped us sharpen our business strategy. I relished the irony. Whatever ripples the announcement may have made, from a business perspective the decision itself was a nonevent.

It was just the final phase of a carefully planned strategic transition that had been 35 years in the making. Preparing each new edition took years at first, and never less than a year. Then, in the s, the contents of the encyclopedia were loaded onto a mainframe computer to streamline the process of making annual updates.

The first edition of the encyclopedia took three years to create; today its reference material is digital only and updated every 20 minutes. Prescient editors and executives recognized that although digitization would make updating more efficient for print, it was only a matter of time before the medium of publication itself would be digital.

And that would represent a threat to the way we did business: selling multivolume encyclopedias to families door-to-door. So in the s we began preparing for that day, experimenting with digital technologies and even publishing the first electronic encyclopedias. The sales model started breaking down in , as families became busier and had less patience for doorstep solicitations and as PCs began shipping with built-in CD-ROM drives—a potential knockout punch.

They also created a new demand for multimedia and interactivity, with which print-focused editorial and product teams had little experience. But by then Microsoft was bundling its CD-ROM encyclopedia, Encarta, with the vast majority of Wintel computers as a loss leader to increase the sales of home PCs by positioning them as a learning tool and a homework helper. It was a brilliant move by Microsoft and a very damaging one for Britannica.

Our direct-sales force was the wrong channel for selling the CD-ROM encyclopedia; moreover, there was no easy way to change the traditional encyclopedia business model, in which the multivolume set was a break-even proposition and the profits came from ensuing subscriptions to the yearbook, a single volume of updates. It was a bold move then: Few publishers had yet seen the web as a place to publish, let alone to put their entire flagship product. But it was a risky move, too. Digital sales rose, but slowly, while print sales fell off a cliff.

The decline was dizzying: From more than , units in , sales fell to 51, in and to just 3, in , when I arrived. Above all, Wikipedia is supremely democratic, as opposed to the elite, expert-based print encyclopedias of yore. Just as the Britannica always reflected the aspirations of its time — to know and understand the world through reason during the Enlightenment, to unify and improve the world in the wake of world war, to evoke middle class stability and prosperity in the s — Wikipedia embodies our own ideals.

View the discussion thread. Skip to main content. Search WTTW:. Playlist History. Thanks to our sponsors:. Most Popular. Geoffrey Baer Explores Polish Chicago. Stay in the know. Sign up for WTTW enews. Watch All Video Kids Video. It is the latest move Encyclopedia Britannica has made to expand its Internet reference services and move farther into educational products.

It first flirted with digital publishing in the s, published a version for computers in for LexisNexis subscribers and first posted to the Internet in Many publications will never have a print analog and will only be printed on digital formats. With its scholarly, reliable reputation, Encyclopedia Britannica had not been affected by the popularity of free website Wikipedia, he said.