ShareThisRecently, the publisher of the 126-year-old, 20-volume, 750-pound, $1,165 Oxford English Dictionary said he thought it was increasingly unlikely that another edition would appear on paper.
It seems that the online version gets 2 million hits a month from subscribers who pay $295 a year, while the latest print edition, issued in 1989 has sold about 30,000 sets. By the time the next edition is ready in about a decade, it is even more unlikely there will be a market for it on paper.
Although this makes sense, there is something sad about it.
Certain printed books signaled their importance just by their heft and the luxuriousness of their bindings. Although Wikipedia has millions upon millions of entries, its Web page doesn't look or feel special.
But when you walked into someone's home a decade or more ago and they had a lavishly bound set of the Encyclopedia Britannica, it was a statement that they valued learning. They were willing to commit money and shelf space.
How does the upwardly bound family communicate this now? By the size of their favorites list?
The Web offers a lot of advantages -- searchability, annotation, bookmarking even printability -- but it lacks the feel, mass and smell of an important book.
Some publishers are hanging in there. The Britannica still offers a printed set but is leaning more and more toward digital. Sales of the 32-volume set peaked in 1990, declined 60 percent in the next six years and are now at about 10 percent of the 1990 level. Britannica has fired its 1,000 door-to-door salesmen.
Germany's foremost encyclopedia, Brockhaus, announced several years ago that it was putting all of its 300,000 articles online for free and possibly would not issue another print edition, something it has been doing since 1808. In 2009, the encyclopedia was still being printed but the brand has been sold.
Initial competition for printed encyclopedias came from Microsoft's Encarta encyclopedia, born in 1993, which became available online and on DVD or CDs.
Microsoft bought rights to Funk and Wagnall's Encyclopedia and approached Britannica, which did not want to play. But the Britannica company was sold at a discount in 1996, largely because print sales could no longer compete with Encarta, which Microsoft was bundling on new computers.
Microsoft also bought Collier's Encyclopedia and New Merit Scholar's Encyclopedia. None of these sets remained in print long after being merged into Encarta.
Then in 2009, Microsoft shut down Encarta, citing changes in the way people seek information.
Microsoft still maintains the Encarta dictionary online at encarta.msn.com/encnet/features/dictionary/dictionaryhome.aspx.
Of course, there have been some encyclopedias that were born digital and never were in print. The best example is Wikipedia.
Since its inception, there has been a debate about accuracy, since it is freely editable.
And then there is the point made by wiki-groaning, the practice of comparing the length of Wikipedia articles to comic effect. For example "Lightsaber Combat" beats out "Modern Warfare."
Just how massive is Wikipedia? The New York Times estimates that it contains 990 million words, compared with 59 million words in the Oxford English Dictionary and 44 million words in Encyclopedia Britannica.
Another Web-born project that will end up massive is the Encyclopedia of Life (www.eol.org), a project to catalog online all species on earth.
So the Web is inexorably becoming the repository of human knowledge.
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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