"The vast majority" of the remaining 85% of revenue is expected to come from educational products and services, said Cauz, who declined to provide dollar amounts but said the company was profitable.Įncyclopedia Britannica, Inc, is owned by the Swiss banking magnate Jacqui Safra. He projects that only 15% of the company's revenue this year will come from its namesake publication, mostly through subscriptions and app purchases. "The company has changed from a reference provider to an instructional solutions provider," Cauz said. Jorge Cauz, president of Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc, suggested that the encyclopedia was already something of a relic within the company itself, which has long since moved its main business away from its trademark publication and into online educational tools. Neither view quite captures the company or the crossroads. Others will wonder, in the era of Wikipedia, what took the dinosaur so long to die. Future editions will live exclusively online.įor some readers the news will provoke malaise at the wayward course of this misguided age. The 32 volumes of the 2010 installment, it turns out, were the last. The Encyclopedia Britannica has announced that after 244 years, dozens of editions and more than 7m sets sold, no new editions will be put to paper.
#2010 encyclopaedia britannica final print software
Joab Jackson covers enterprise software and general technology breaking news for The IDG News Service.
#2010 encyclopaedia britannica final print free
To build awareness of the online offering, Britannica will also offer its entire online encyclopedia free for one week, beginning Wednesday. To this end, the company is working with Google and other search engines to make its material more visible in search results. The company has estimated that each month people make between 1.2 billion and 1.5 billion search engine queries "for which Britannica would have the perfect answer," he said. Britannica is profitable in the educational market, but in the consumer space, we need to do more to make sure people have access to the encyclopedia," Cauz said. Over the next few years, however, Britannica wants to attract more general users for its apps and online services. More than 85 percent of sales in the digital realm come from educational institutions, which buy bulk subscriptions for students. It also solicits contributions from notable world figures, such as Bill Clinton, Desmond Tutu and Tony Hawk. It provides a forum for users to contribute additions, which then get considered by in-house editors. It includes multimedia assets such as sound recordings and video. The online Britannica is constantly updated. Over the years, Britannica has changed the way it collects and edits information in a way that more closely resembles Wikipedia's community-driven effort. By moving entirely online, Britannica is taking on online giant Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia written entirely by volunteers. The site gets 580 million visitors a year.Ĭauz admitted that the company must work harder to keep its name in front of its potential audience. The online editions have served more than 100 million students, Cauz said. The company has offered an online edition of the encyclopedia for the past 20 years, and now makes the majority of its revenue from online products and mobile applications. The print set can't bring that reliability because it gets obsolete so quickly and because it doesn't have all the material that is online." The value proposition in our case is to be a reliable source. "No one is expecting total comprehensiveness. "The perception of what is comprehensive has changed significantly," he said. Youths today often look at the 32-volume set and think that it seems too small, Cauz said. Such considerations, however, are "a generational issue," Cauz said. As a student, "the encyclopedia for me was the shortest time between doing homework and starting to play," Cauz said. The volumes, lined up authoritatively across a bookshelf, imparted a sense of gravitas about the material they contained and the mission of the company that published them. Even pricing-wise, the online edition makes better sense - at least for consumers: The basic subscription to the online version runs US$17 a year, or $1.99 a month, while the print set costs $1,400.Įven though the print edition hasn't been a significant form of revenue for the company for some time, Cauz admitted that the volumes are iconic for the company. The effort it takes to pack the most relevant of that information into book form is considerable for the company.
The amount of material the company has amassed online has dwarfed the print edition. Over the past few years, the print edition accounted for less than 1 percent of Britannica's revenue. Britannica's move to stop printing encyclopedias is a telling moment in this point in history, when print is being superseded by websites and network-connected applications.
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