COTOJE.CZ

» see cotoje.cz as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

A subscription encyclopedia in Czech had one possible audience and it was not an audience I could have joined. What crossed the language barrier fine is the premise: in 2002 the sane assumption was still that somebody had to pay for a reference work, because somebody had paid for every reference work that came before it.

Aion CS and Globe Internet started building in 2000 and opened COTOJE.CZ two years later. The product was the digitized text of the major Czech encyclopedias in one searchable database. The historical half came from the Otto house, both the nineteenth-century Ottův slovník naučný and the later Ottova encyklopedie nové doby. The twentieth-century half was Malá československá encyklopedie and the Universum encyclopedia.

The scale is worth saying in the units the operators used, because they clearly enjoyed saying it: fifty-six books, which came to fifty-one thousand printed pages or around 130,000 standard manuscript pages. Inside that sat roughly half a million entries and close to 30,000 pictures, many of them engravings that existed nowhere else in digital form.

Access was metered. Search was free and so was the first fragment of every entry, enough to confirm the thing you were looking for existed and not enough to tell you anything about it. Full text cost money, with two exceptions that reveal who the operators thought their real customer was: Czech schools got it free, and so did anyone sitting in the Municipal Library of Prague.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ fifty-six books ~

The front page carried a date line that gave you the Gregorian date next to the traditional Jewish year, then added which animal the Chinese year belonged to. It told you whose name day it was. It told you how many birth anniversaries and how many death anniversaries the database held for that date. A featured entry sat in the corner. The one frozen into the final screenshot is Giotto.

Underneath that were three colored bars for browsing by volume rather than by search, which is a reference habit carried over from paper and quietly abandoned by every encyclopedia that came after. The partner logos along the bottom edge included Microsoft and the Universum imprint, the marks of a publishing deal that predated the website.

None of that was cheap to assemble. Scanning and keying fifty-one thousand printed pages of Czech, with the diacritics intact and the engravings separated out, was the kind of project that justified a paywall in 2002 on straightforward arithmetic. Then the arithmetic stopped working, while the cost of the scanning stayed exactly where it had been.

~ what the free web did to it ~

Part of the text had been visible free inside Seznam's own encyclopedia product until March 2009, which was the last arrangement that put COTOJE content where an undecided reader would trip over it. After that the paywall was the whole relationship, at exactly the moment Czech Wikipedia was becoming good enough that a Czech speaker looking up Giotto had an obvious free alternative. The notice that went up in late 2012 told subscribers the service would end with the year and thanked them for their long patronage. The reasons, it said, were mainly economic.

The portal was last archived intact on 22 November 2012, at around 5.4 kilobytes. The next capture, on 7 January 2013, is 686 bytes whose entire body is a single image. The image is a screenshot of the live site frozen at 12:38 on 3 January 2013, with red text laid over it saying operation of the encyclopedia was terminated as of that date and any questions should go to an Aion email address. Thirteen years later cotoje.cz still answers. What it serves is 482 bytes of JavaScript whose only job is to forward a browser to a domain reseller.

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