On 11/26/06, Steve Bennett <stevagewp(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 11/27/06, David Gerard <dgerard(a)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