Wave goodbye to every 70's game show's favorite consolation prize.

For 244 years, when you needed to learn about a topic, there’s only one place you went to look.  You headed to the bookshelf and you researched in the Encyclopaedia Brittanica.  Well, like buggy whips and ivory piano keys, the encyclopedia is rapidly becoming a thing of the past.  The Encyclopaedia Brittanica will end publication after 244 years.  The 32-volume, 129-pound 201o edition will be the last set of Encyclopaedia Brittanica produced in paper form.  I have no doubt that the OED will be joining Brittanica soon enough.

“It’s a rite of passage in this new era.  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,” said Jorge Cauz, the president of Encyclopaedia Brittanica Inc., based in Chicago.  “We have very different value propositions.  Britannica is going to be smaller.  We cannot deal with every single cartoon character, we cannot deal with every love life of every celebrity.  But we need to have an alternative where facts really matter.  Britannica won’t be able to be as large, but it will always be factually correct.”

In 1990, Encyclopaedia Brittanica sold a staggering 120,000 copies.  Thus far, the 2010 edition sold 8,000 copies at $1395 (and there are still 4,000 yet to be sold).  Indeed, the print portion of Brittanica’s revenue amounts to only 1 percent of the company’s profits.  A staggering 85 percent comes from selling their information/entries to school text books and the like, while 15 percent of the profits come from the website.  Over 500,000 people pay $70 a year to be subscribers to the Brittanica website.

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