Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th edition, with Britannica book of the year 2002, with white library... [+]
Just a few weeks ago they couldn’t give them away. Now, they’re selling like hotcakes.
Last month, Encyclopaedia Brittanica made headlines announcing that it was going to stop printing the oldest continuously printed English encyclopedia. At the time, the New York Times notes, it had around 4,000 sets of their final edition sitting in a warehouse.
Writes reporter Julie Bosman:
Before it announced the end of the print edition on March 13, Britannica was selling the encyclopedias at a languid pace of about 60 each week, at a $1,395 price tag. Since then, it has sold about 1,050 each week, or 150 a day, at the same price.
That is in line with an average week’s sales for some of the periods when the company had a fully staffed sales force. The company expects the remaining 1,000 sets to disappear by mid- to late April. (Sales of the print Encyclopaedia Britannica reached their peak in 1990, when 120,000 sets were sold domestically.)
It appears that Encyclopaedia Brittanica is now officially retro. It’s always the way – scarcity creates demand, and now that the number of Encycopaedia Brittanica sets in the world is officially capped, expect nostalgic yearnings for print media to gradually raise the price in the coming years.
There may have been a time when Encyclopaedia Brittanica was the ultimate collection of knowledge available at one’s fingertips, but the internet was starting to claim that title even before the crowdsourced Wikipedia became the go-to source of information for anyone with a computer.
Still, the world isn’t really losing too much in the way of accuracy. A 2005 study by the scientific journal Nature found that Wikipedia was as accurate as Brittanica.
Source: New York Times
