Encyclopædia Britannica (print)

» see britannica.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

britannica was first issued in edinburgh in december 1768 as a fascicle in a planned three-volume work, with the first complete set finished in 1771. it survived the transition from coffee-house republic of letters to victorian household furniture to twentieth-century american door-to-door sales empire. the eleventh edition (1910 to 1911) is the one literary historians lean on, the one bertrand russell and aldous huxley grew up reading. the fifteenth edition is the one most people picture: a rust-red cloth wall in a study, with a separate macropaedia and micropaedia organization that no other encyclopedia copied.

the print business cratered fast and visibly. in 1990 britannica sold 120,000 sets in north america alone. in 1996 it sold 3,000. encarta, bundled free on every windows pc, removed the standard reason a household bought the set. when wikipedia got going in the early 2000s, the rump market for paid digital reference also went away. britannica had pivoted to an online subscription product by 1994 and a cd-rom version by 1989, but the shelf object was the brand, and the shelf object cost real money to print and ship.

the 2010 set was 32 volumes, 32,640 pages, 12,000 sets pressed. by march 2012 about 8,000 had sold and the warehouse held 4,000. company president jorge cauz announced on march 13 2012 that those 4,000 would be the last printed run in the brand's history, and the print operation was closed. britannica.com kept the subscription and contributor model going. the press release framed it as a confident pivot rather than a funeral.

i grew up in turkey and the english-language britannica was not a household object in my house. there was anabritannica, a turkish-license edition published by ana yayıncılık through the 80s and 90s, and meydan larousse on the shelf in many homes. the english britannica was a library and university object for me, never a living-room one. by the time i would have used a paper reference set seriously, encarta was on every school computer and altavista was already two years old.

~ the case file ~

~ the door-to-door era ~

britannica's twentieth-century american business was built on commission salesmen knocking on suburban doors with payment plans. the pitch sold the set as an investment in a child's future. in the 1960s a family could finance a 24-volume set over years of monthly payments, and the salesperson came back to upsell yearbooks. that channel stayed dominant until cd-roms killed it in the early 90s. the door-to-door brittanica salesman is part of the same vanishing post-war consumer landscape as the door-to-door fuller brush man.

the company also ran a profitable second line in films and study aids for schools. britannica films was a recognizable brand of 16mm classroom reels in the 1970s. that part of the business spun off and was sold long before the print encyclopedia died.

~ the encarta event ~

microsoft licensed funk and wagnalls in 1989 and shipped encarta in 1993 on cd-rom for around 100 dollars, then bundled it free on consumer pcs. the price of a britannica set in 1990 was around 1,500 dollars. parents who had been buying the set as a gift for a school-age kid bought a multimedia pc instead and got the encyclopedia thrown in. the historical sales numbers tell the rest. britannica revenue collapsed from ~650 million across the 1990s to under 200 million by the late decade. there was no comeback path against a free competitor of merely good-enough quality.

~ what got buried with it ~

the physical object was its own kind of authority. you opened a volume and found a contributor's signature at the end of an article, often a recognizable scholar. a 1985 entry on jazz might be by a working musicologist; a chemistry article might be signed by a nobel laureate. the format made the trust visible. wikipedia carries some of the same trust but renders it as a footnote density rather than a name on the page. you cannot pull a wikipedia article off a shelf and feel the weight.

britannica.com is still operational and still pays its contributors, so the brand is not dead in the sense that gawker is dead. it is dead in the older sense, where a company kept its name and ceased producing the thing the name was attached to. for two hundred and forty-four years that thing was the set on the shelf, and now it is not.

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