By spring 1996, the company abruptly ended the door-to-door sales operation, cutting loose about 2,500 contract sales people worldwide, according to Cauz. With sales plummeting and profits gone, Britannica’s owner, the Benton Foundation, sold the encyclopedia operation to Swiss investor Jacob Safra in late 1995. By 1994, print sales at Britannica had fallen to $453 million, and the company struggled to adapt to fast-evolving digital platforms.
The beginning of the end for the print version came when Microsoft released Encarta in 1993, which impacted Britannica’s bottom line almost overnight. “This is going to be as rare as the first edition, because the last print run of our last copyright was one of the smallest print runs.” “This is probably going to be a collector’s item,” Cauz said. After they are gone, the iconic publication will be history. There are about 4,000 sets left, selling for $1,395 each on the Britannica website. The last run in 2010 produced about 12,000 sets of a new 32-volume copyright based on the 15th edition, a version that first rolled off the presses in 1974. More recently, the rise of high-speed Internet and Wikipedia shifted reference libraries online, with only a few thousand copies of the printed version trickling out each year to libraries, schools and a handful of neo-Luddite homeowners, according to Cauz. Within a few years, sales began to tumble, as consumers opted for home computers bundled with CD-ROM encyclopedias over the $1,500 leather-bound sets. Marketed door-to-door for generations, it was a robust business that employed thousands and sold more than 100,000 sets as recently as 1990, its best year ever, when it generated $650 million in revenue. Neatly bound and brimming with facts, figures and illustrations, it was the authority on just about everything - a repository of all human knowledge distilled into alphabetized volumes and tucked on a shelf.įounded in 1768 in Scotland, Britannica has been headquartered in Chicago since 1935, when it was under the ownership of Sears. In the days before the Internet, before television, before radio, before the United States was even a country, there was the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Our print set version is an abridged version of what we have online.” “Our database is very large now, much larger than can fit in the printed edition. “We just decided that it was better for the brand to focus on what really the future is all about,” said Jorge Cauz, Encyclopaedia Britannica’s president. It’s a technological evolution, a cultural benchmark and, certainly, a moment in history. That’s because after 244 years, the Chicago-based company is shelving its venerable printed edition in favor of its Web-based version, completing a digital transition and marking the end of one of longest chapters in publishing history.
"With the end of the Britannica print set, we complete the transition from print to digital," the company said.There have been more than 7 million sets of Encyclopaedia Britannica printed and sold over the years, an indispensable home reference library lining bookshelves, fueling dreams and salvaging homework assignments everywhere. Eight years later, the multimedia CD hit the stands and 1994, the group launched the first encyclopedia on the Internet. Remaining a prominent print publisher over a century, Encyclopaedia Britannica came out with the first digital encyclopedia in 1981. The entity, which once focused on door-to-door sales of its popular encyclopaedias, now garners majority of revenues from online sales. "And it is up to date because we can revise it within minutes anytime we need to, and we do it many times each day," Cauz said in another blog. Stressing that the decision to stop print edition has "great significance", Encyclopaedia Britannica's President Jorge Cauz said that its digital database is much larger than "what we can fit in the print set". The prized publication comes every two years and the last print edition hit the stands in 2010.
in a larger sense this is just another historical data point in the evolution of human knowledge," Encyclopaedia Britannica said in a blog on Tuesday.Ī brainchild of three Scotsmen, the first print edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica came out way back in 1768. "Today, we've announced that we will discontinue the 32-volume printed edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica when our current inventory is gone. The announcement by US-based Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc is yet another testimony to the growing prominence of online and digital content. Bringing the curtains down on a 244-year-old legacy, Encyclopaedia Britannica is stopping its famed 32-volume print edition.Ī popular reference book dotting the shelves of libraries and institutions worldwide, only the digital versions of Encyclopaedia Britannica would be available once the existing inventory of print editions is exhausted.
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