Thursday, March 15, 2012

       Now we have to doubt the whole knowledge is going digital ? The famous Britannica Encyclopedia Is Stopping All Its Presses After a long 244 years of Being a Final Word For Knowledge About Anything. This move is a part of move to Digital Data Conservation. Those golden books were once sold door-to-door by a fleet of traveling salesmen and displayed as proud fixtures in American homes will be discontinued, company executives said.

   And in this quicker growing Digital World, Encyclopedia Britannica will focus primarily on its online encyclopedias and educational curriculum for schools. The last print version is the 32-volume 2010 edition, which weighs 129 pounds and includes new entries on global warming and the Human Genome Project. There are 4000 set of Encyclopedia. The company added that they will completely stop printing after selling those remaining Set of Golden Books. 


Sales of the Britannica peaked in 1990, when 120,000 sets were sold in the United States. But now print encyclopedias account for less than 1 percent of the Britannica’s revenue. About 85% revenue is coming from selling curriculum products like Math, Science and English language where the other 15% is from Online Subscriptions from it's website. And there is needless to say that Presence of Online Encyclopedias like Wikipedia has also influenced a bad effect in the popularity of Britannica Encyclopedia. 

Many librarians say that while they have rapidly shifted money and resources to digital materials, print still has a place. Academic libraries tend to keep many sets of specialized encyclopedias on their shelves, like volumes on Judaica, folklore, music or philosophy, or encyclopedias that are written in foreign languages and unavailable online.


  Let us hope the digitization of this Knowledge library will increase purity of content of Internet and make it much more useful as maximum as possible. 

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