Encyclopaedia Britannica stops print edition after 244 years
London - The Encyclopaedia Britannica, the time-honoured lexicon of which 7 million sets have been sold, has announced that it will stop publishing its weighty 32-volume print edition and go exclusively online after nearly a quarter of a millenium.
"After 244 years in print, the 32-volume Encyclopaedia Britannica will be discontinued, but the encyclopedia will live on and grow in the myriad digital forms which have been popular with millions for years," a statement on its website said Wednesday.
The firm, which used to sell its encyclopaedias door-to-door, now generates almost 85 per cent of its revenue from online sales. It said it would focus on digital expansion amid rising competition from websites such as Wikipedia.
The Encyclopaedia Britannica was first published in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1768.
"The sales of printed encyclopaedias have been negligible for several years," said Jorge Cauz president of Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., headquartered in Chicago.
"We may not be as big as Wikipedia. But we have a scholarly voice, an editorial process, and fact-based, well-written articles," Cauz told the Guardian newspaper Wednesday.
"All of these things we believe are very, very important, and provide an alternative that we want to offer to as many people as possible," he said.
"For some readers the news will provoke malaise at the wayward course of this misguided age. Others will wonder, in the era of Wikipedia, what took the dinosaur so long to die," the Guardian commented Wednesday.//DPA
