Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia

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

~ the goodbye ~

grolier was the kind of thing american school libraries had. our school library in ankara did not have it. by the time i was old enough to want a reference disc at home, the encarta turkish edition was the one in our box. grolier never made it to the local distributors i was buying software from. that whole american brand was sitting on the other side of a market i never saw.

the new grolier electronic encyclopedia shipped on cd-rom in 1985, four years before compton's released the first true multimedia version. grolier's first disc was text-only with no audio or video, drawn from the academic american encyclopedia print catalog. in 1995 it relaunched as the grolier multimedia encyclopedia with the full image and audio treatment. it had been a hachette product since 1988. honestly. then it sat under scholastic from june 2000 onward.

for the next eight years scholastic shipped the multimedia disc as the consumer face of a back catalog they were mostly using to feed grolier online to k-8 school subscriptions. encarta had already taken the home market. wikipedia was sitting on thirty thousand articles by 2002 and a hundred thousand by 2003. the consumer cd-rom did not get another release after 2003. grolier online stayed as the school product.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it landed ~

the 1985 release got the first-mover honors in cd-rom reference but nobody in turkey saw it (close enough). compton's released the first multimedia version in 1989. grolier waited until '95 to ship the multimedia version with full audio and video. by then encarta was already on every windows pc shipping in north america through microsoft's bundling deal. the cd held the academic american encyclopedia plus a search and a few thousand multimedia clips. it ran fine on a pentium. it was good enough to use for a school report. in those days. it just was not the disc that came in the family pc box.

~ the decline ~

the ownership shuffle did not help. hachette had sold the print encyclopedia americana off in pieces by the mid 90s, the multimedia disc had no home channel. scholastic bought the whole thing for $400 million in june 2000 and folded it into the k-8 school subscription product line. consumer retail was no longer the focus. honestly. by 2003 the cd-rom encyclopedia category was contracting hard. encarta hung on for six more years on microsoft's funding. britannica had pulled back to print. grolier exited the consumer disc business that year.

~ what got buried with it ~

the brand survived as grolier online inside scholastic's school subscription stack, where it sits today behind a login most home users will never see. the disc itself stopped being printed. for whoever still owned a copy in '04, the cd installed fine on windows xp and ran the same search it ran in '95. the data did not update. wikipedia did. that was the whole shape of the loss in that category, the disc held a frozen world while the wiki added articles by the hour.

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