One of my fondest memories of growing up is reading our family’s New Book of Knowledge Encyclopedia set. It’s geeky, I know, but as a child I spent countless hours exploring our 1974 set. Whatever I wanted to learn about, it was in there: peregrine falcons, cheetahs, manatees, attending the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs (a dream my poor vision put to death quite young).
Sometimes I would just sit and page through a particular volume, looking for maps or images that caught my eye. For me, at least, the idea that there was so much stuff out there to learn about was deeply intriguing … and alluring. And the amount of knowledge contained in that multi-volume set of tomes seemed functionally limitless to my curious young brain.
I suspect that many of those who grew up in my generation may have had similar experiences. Alas, the days of unfettered encyclopedic exploration—at least, in hard copy form—are drawing to a close.
On March 13, the venerable Encyclopaedia Britannica announced that the 2010 print edition—all 32 volumes weighing in at 129 pounds—will be the last to see publication in physical form. After 244 years in print, the granddaddy of encyclopedias has become yet another casualty of the digital age. Given free online resources such as Wikipedia, fewer and fewer customers saw the need to pony up $1,395 for the privilege of owning a print version, no matter how pretty the gold binding might be.
Even before the Internet, though, encyclopedia ownership had been on the wane. According to The New York Times, sales of the Encyclopaedia Britannica peaked in 1990, when 120,000 sets were sold in the United States. Since then, it’s seen a steady decline—hastened, of course, by online competition.
The print version of the Encyclopaedia Britannica will be no more. But the storied tome of knowledge will still exist in digital form for an annual fee of $70. To listen to Jorge Cauz, president of Chicago-based Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc., the digital-only version will have some definite advantages over the print version. “It’s a rite of passage in this new era,” Cauz told the New York Times. “Some people will feel sad about it and nostalgic about it. But we have a better tool now. The Web site is continuously updated, it’s much more expansive and it has multimedia.”
Sure. I can’t argue with that logic.
And yet …
I do find myself feeling a bit sad and nostalgic. For all it’s whiz-bang content, something about surfing an Internet encyclopedia for knowledge doesn’t feel quite the same to me. There might be tons of hyperlinks in an entry and plenty of opportunity for learning. But I’m not convinced that clicking through links in an online entry will ever offer quite the same experience of serendipitous discovery that casually flipping through the “S” volume of a hard copy encyclopedia might.
A postscript: The same morning I began writing this blog post, my 5-year-old son, Henry, was finishing a homework project for his kindergarten class. In conjunction with St. Patrick’s Day, his class was learning about Ireland. As I was reading about the death of the Encyclopaedia Britannica online as I ate my breakfast, I noticed that my wife was making a copy of a map of Ireland from our 1964 World Book Encyclopedia set (given to us recently by an elderly friend). Even though it’s nearly 50 years old and I’m sure some of its entries are badly outdated (like, say, maps of Eastern Europe), there’s still plenty that hasn’t changed in the world. And I’m glad my children will have access to it in book form … just in case they want to see what manatees, cheetahs and peregrine falcons looked like in 1964.
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