[WikiEN-l] (semi-OT) What to do with old but not old enough encyclopedias?

Mon Nov 27 02:48:39 UTC 2006

On 11/26/06, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 11/27/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Now, now! EB is a fantastic book, one of the great nonfiction works of
> > Anglophone culture. Their current marketing operation may seem to be
> > spending far too much of its time working on running down Wikipedia
> > rather than e.g. selling a good encyclopedia, but that doesn't lessen
> > the respect Britannica is due.
>
> It's a great encyclopaedia*, that's why I bought it. I just don't
> think it's a viable product anymore - costs too much to produce, and
> isn't worth enough money to enough people. Think of the paper version:
> apart from the cuteness of a wall of encyclopaedia, what's it actually
> worth to you? Would you ever use it? Could you really be bothered
> opening it up and manually finding an article without a search
> function? How about the electronic version: Wikipedia and the rest of
> the web being free, how much would you spend for one more source?
>
> Steve
>
> * Or so I've heard.

A couple years ago I bought an encyclopedia from the thrift store.  It
cost 25 cents a book, I believe.  Anyway, going through it in a random
fashion I found that there was quite a lot of information in the book
that wasn't in Wikipedia.  Wikipedia has grown a lot since then, so
I'm not sure how much this has changed.

That said, I fully agree that the general encyclopedia, at least as a
non-free-as-in-beer resource, is on its way to obsolescence.  Not so
much due to Wikipedia, though that's a factor, but really due to the
Internet.

Books are still the king when it comes to *most* specialized
information.  For now...

Anthony