When was britannica electronically published

While there is inertia among scholars, there is also a much more understandable inertia in the library system, given their huge accumulated print collections. These collections will have to be maintained until the slow conversion to digital format is completed. And some materials will never be converted. Further, there may well be a revival of scholarly monograph publishing, which has been getting squeezed out of library budgets by journals, as is shown by the ARL budget figures [ ARL ].

It is hard to forecast what effect this will have on the libraries, though, since the number of monographs published is likely to increase, but many of them will be distributed electronically. The main job losses will be in the less-skilled positions with the part-time student assistants who check out and reshelve material going first. Reference librarians are likely to thrive, although their job titles may not mention the library. After all, we will be in the Information Age, and there will be much more information to collect, classify, and navigate.

Information specialists are likely to abound and have much more interesting jobs. Although there will be many opportunities, librarians will have to compete to retain their preeminence as information specialists [ Odlyzko5 ] by operating in new ways. However, there are two other jobs that they are also well-positioned to retain. One is negotiating electronic access licenses. The other is enforcing access restrictions. It is worth emphasizing that if the publishers do succeed in their approach, and disintermediate the librarians while retaining their revenues and profits, the resulting system is likely to be much superior to the present one.

Defenders of the current libraries tend to come from top research universities, which do have excellent library collections. That is an exception, though. Most scholars, and an overwhelming majority of the population, make due with very limited access to those precious storehouses of knowledge. For the bulk of the world's population, little is available. Electronic publishing promises far wider and superior access.

I am not forecasting a new age of universal enlightenment, with the couch potatoes starting to read scholarly articles. However, there will be growth in usage of scholarly publications by the general public. The informal associations devoted to discussions of medical problems those on AIDS present the best example show how primary research material does get used by the wide public if it is easily available and perceived as relevant.

For scholars alone, there will be a huge increase in productivity with much easier access to a wider range of information. The basic strategy of the publishers, faced with pressure to reduce costs, is to reduce the role of libraries. There is nothing nefarious in this approach. As we move towards the information age, different groups will be vying to fill various rapidly evolving ecological niches. After all, many scholars are proposing that they and the librarians disintermediate the publishers, while others would bypass librarians and publishers both, and handle all of primary research publishing themselves.

In this environment, some of the potential extremely important players might be Kinko's copy shops. They may end up disintermediating the bookstores and libraries by teaming up with publishers to print books on demand.

They might also disintermediate the publishers by making deals directly with authors and their agents. The previous section outlined the strategy that established publishers appear to be pursuing or likely to pursue. Here we discuss the tactics. There are extensive fears and complaints about the pricing and access policies publishers offer for their electronic journals, as can be seen in the messages on the Liblicense discussion list archive [ LIBL ] and the electronic Newsletter of Serials Pricing Issues [ NSPI ].

Many of these concerns are likely to be allayed with time, as they are natural outcomes of a move towards a new technological and economic environment. By negotiations, compromise, and experiment, librarians and publishers will work out standard licensing terms that they and scholars can live with.

As one example, there is great concern among librarians and scholars about access to electronic journal articles once a subscription is canceled. This is clearly an issue, but one that can be solved through negotiations. Some issues that are raised by librarians will not go away. The basic problem with information goods is that marginal costs are negligible. Therefore pricing according to costs is not viable, and it is necessary to price according to value. What this means is that we will be forced into new economic models.

Many people, especially Hal Varian [Varian], have been arguing for a long time that we will see much greater use of methods such as bundling, differential quality, and differential pricing. See also [ Odlyzko2 , Odlyzko3 , SchapiroV ]. Unfortunately this will increase complaints about unfairness [ Odlyzko3 ]. Many of the prices and policies will seem arbitrary. That is because they will be largely arbitrary, designed to make customers pay according to their willingness and ability to pay.

The current U. However, those practices are universally disliked. That may also be the fate of scholarly journal publishing in cyberspace. Pricing according to value means different prices for different institutions. Hollywood rents movies to TV networks at prices reflecting the size and affluence of that network's audience, so a national network in Ireland will pay much more than one in Iceland but much less than one of the large U.

We can expect prices of electronic scholarly journals to be settled increasingly by negotiations. The consolidation of publishers as well as libraries through consortia will help make this process manageable. There is unhappiness among scholars and librarians about restrictions on usage of some electronic databases, such as limiting the number of simultaneous users, or restricting usage to a single workstation inside the library.

The preferred location of access is, of course, the scholar's office. However, that is precisely the point: to offer a more convenient version such as one available without restrictions from any place on campus for a high price, and a less convenient version that requires a physical visit to the library, and possibly waiting in line for a lower price.

Such techniques are likely to proliferate, and a natural function for libraries will be to enforce restrictions imposed by publishers. We can already see this in the license conditions for hybrid journals that appear both in print and electronic formats. Publishers of such journals almost universally allow only the print version to be used for interlibrary loans.

Although no publisher has explained clearly the rationale for this restriction, it is easy to figure out its role. Obtaining a copy of the paper article is slow, cumbersome, and expensive, and this serves to deter wide use of interlibrary loans as substitutes for owning the journal.

If interlibrary loans of electronic versions were allowed, though, the borrower would be in almost the same position as a subscriber. Even if only paper copies of electronic versions of an article were allowed, the ease of making the copy from the digital form and mailing it out would make interlibrary loans much faster and less expensive, and that might undermine the market for subscriptions.

Artificial restrictions in order to maintain subscriptions are becoming much more obvious in cyberspace than in print, but they are not new. For example, even a casual examination shows that the Copyright Clearance Center CCC and the copyright litigations of the last two decades have practically no economic value to publishers aside from restricting photocopying and thus maintaining the subscriber base. Not all this money was for scholarly publishing, and even if it were, it is tiny compared to total revenues in the U.

Thus all the legal attacks on supposedly illicit photocopying and the demands for CCC fees provide little additional revenue. However, they do serve to discourage dropping of subscriptions, by making copying more expensive and more cumbersome.

Many scholars have run into problems obtaining permission to republish their works in collected-papers volumes and the like, with reprint fees often being demanded. Yet such fees bring in trivial amounts of money. Some publishers, such as the American Economic Association [ Getz ] and Association for Computing Machinery ACM , grant blanket permissions for copying for educational use, as they have decided that the costs of handling all the copy requests are higher than the revenue derived from that activity.

Thus, insisting on handling copy requests is another barrier that exists not to increase revenues directly, but to discourage copying. A major concern of librarians and scholars alike is that publishers will move towards a "pay-per-view" model [ Kiernan2 ].

There is little evidence of this happening, and on balance, just the opposite is occurring. There is a spread of consortium licensing, in which a publisher licenses all its electronic journals to all the institutions in a region, state, or even country the United Kingdom is taking the lead in national licensing. This was to be expected. While some economic models favor pay-per-view [ ChuangS ], and such pricing approaches are likely to be used in some fraction of cases to deal with unusual needs, subscriptions, bundling, and site licensing are likely to dominate.

This conclusion is supported by standard economic models [ BakosB , Odlyzko3 , Varian ]. It is also supported by empirical evidence of people's aversion to pay-per-view cf. Fishburn et al. There are likely to be "pay-per-view" options, but they will probably be of marginal importance, just for dealing with demand from those who do not fit into the large classes covered by some subscription or site-license model.

A major reason for this is "sticker shock. On the other hand, all studies that have been carried out suggest that such an article is read, even if superficially i. This is also consistent with data from the Ginsparg archive, where on average a paper is downloaded on the order of times in its first two years there.

I predict that few scholars would be willing to pay that much, especially for an article they had only seen the abstract for, even if the money came from their grants or departmental budgets.

Of course they effectively do pay that much now, but the charges are hidden. A shift to "pay-per-view" would expose the exorbitant costs of the current system and increase the pressure to change. Bundling, site licensing, and consortium pricing are all strategies that enable publishers to increase their revenues by averaging out the different valuations that individual readers or libraries place on articles or journals.

Many librarians regard consortia as advantageous because they supposedly provide greater bargaining power and thus lower prices. However, they are more likely to be helpful to publishers in maximizing their revenues. Consider a simple example of a library consortium formed by three institutions, call them A, B, and C.

Suppose that A is a major research university, B a big liberal arts school with some research programs, and C a strictly teaching school. Although books and computers are often cast as adversaries, a curious link between the print Britannica and the cyberworld materialized some years ago. Consider this: one volume set of the printed Encyclopaedia Britannica includes about the same number of words as average textbooks. On the third floor, in the company library, five black metal bookshelves hold a set of every edition ever printed.

The three volumes in the upper left-hand corner of the top shelf, are replicas of the first edition, produced in Edinburgh between and Yet even the replica delights Passaro, who points out that the first fat volume contains entries beginning with A and B, and the second volume C through L. It is uncertain whether it be a peninsula or an island. They are extremely pusillanimous, inconstant, stupid, and even insensible.

This Ninth Edition also incorporates photography for the first time, and it was one of the most heavily pirated editions, because the relatively new photographic process made copying so much easier—copyright laws had not yet been enacted.

What was really nice about it is that the articles are extremely well written, especially in the humanities. Although the eleventh edition was largely written as well as printed in England, ownership of the company had passed into American hands by Sears, Roebuck and Company bought it in , and during the following decade three more editions appeared. This has occurred ever since, with two notable exceptions. Instead of releasing yet another printing of the 14th edition in , Britannica, with enormous fanfare, announced the creation of a 15th edition.

More than contributors from all over the globe rewrote the entire content. Mortimer Adler, who led the huge editorial undertaking, also devised a radical new structure for the self-proclaimed summary of all human learning. But the index was omitted, probably the most disliked aspect of the controversial new set.

So in Britannica reorganized the books again, though for marketing reasons the set was called the 12th printing of the 15th edition rather than the 16th edition. The version of the Encyclopaedia Britannica that was printed this year is still known as the 15th edition, though its content resembles that of the product very little. But he says what they tend to overlook is the work and expense involved in maintaining an existing one.

He says publishers of high-quality reference material typically figure they have to spend anywhere from 5 to 12 percent of their original development costs every year to update the material. The edition of the Encyclopedia Americana, the bulletin points out, lists year-old population figures for Spain and refers to punched cards.

Indiscriminate changes and additions to the content of a document can require that almost every page be redesigned and reprinted, as type is shifted from one sheet to succeeding ones. Instead of incurring that enormous expense every year publishers choose to change only some sections. How do they choose which pages to revise?

World events can disrupt this planning process. EB officials say that when the Berlin Wall fell in November of and Germany was reunited the company decided to amend articles in the printing even though the cost would far exceed what had been budgeted.

Altogether almost 5, pages were affected. Even more routine updates have surprising consequences. However, the size of the set does not change. Not necessarily on that page, but from one nearby in order to minimize the number of pages that are in work.

Some observers believe Britannica took too long to develop these products. The central point of the article seemed indisputable: Britannica had missed the boat that was carrying several other encyclopedia companies to fame and at least the prospect of fortune. The Encyclopedia Britannica, which has been in continuous print since it was first published in Edinburgh, Scotland in , said Tuesday it will end publication of its printed editions and continue with digital versions available online.

The company said it will keep selling print editions until the current stock of around sets ran out. It is the latest move Encyclopedia Britannica has made to expand its Internet reference services and move farther into educational products. The World Book is the more accessible.

Encyclopedias written for adults -- as opposed to children's sets -- cost thousands. Can you put encyclopedias in recycle bin? The cover and spine contain non-paper materials that are considered contaminants in the paper recycling stream.

Most libraries or other book reuse and resale organizations do not accept encyclopedias or text books. Always check with them beforehand. It's a brilliant resource and despite all the scare stories about material being made up, the chances are that much of it is accurate.

In fact a few years ago a study suggested that there were more errors in Britannica. Britannica is committed to fairness and responsibility not only in its content but in the manner in which its content is revised; no revision to content can go online without careful review by Britannica's editors. What are the best encyclopedias? Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Find more than 6,, English entries, written and edited by users.

World Book. Traditional encyclopedia in print since World Digital Library.