How many editions of encyclopaedia britannica

In fact, the internet enabled us to reinvent ourselves and open new channels of business. Reports cited Wikipedia as a disruptive force. In fact, Wikipedia helped us sharpen our business strategy. I relished the irony. Whatever ripples the announcement may have made, from a business perspective the decision itself was a nonevent. It was just the final phase of a carefully planned strategic transition that had been 35 years in the making.

Preparing each new edition took years at first, and never less than a year. Then, in the s, the contents of the encyclopedia were loaded onto a mainframe computer to streamline the process of making annual updates. The first edition of the encyclopedia took three years to create; today its reference material is digital only and updated every 20 minutes.

Prescient editors and executives recognized that although digitization would make updating more efficient for print, it was only a matter of time before the medium of publication itself would be digital. And that would represent a threat to the way we did business: selling multivolume encyclopedias to families door-to-door. So in the s we began preparing for that day, experimenting with digital technologies and even publishing the first electronic encyclopedias. The sales model started breaking down in , as families became busier and had less patience for doorstep solicitations and as PCs began shipping with built-in CD-ROM drives—a potential knockout punch.

They also created a new demand for multimedia and interactivity, with which print-focused editorial and product teams had little experience. But by then Microsoft was bundling its CD-ROM encyclopedia, Encarta, with the vast majority of Wintel computers as a loss leader to increase the sales of home PCs by positioning them as a learning tool and a homework helper.

It was a brilliant move by Microsoft and a very damaging one for Britannica. Our direct-sales force was the wrong channel for selling the CD-ROM encyclopedia; moreover, there was no easy way to change the traditional encyclopedia business model, in which the multivolume set was a break-even proposition and the profits came from ensuing subscriptions to the yearbook, a single volume of updates. It was a bold move then: Few publishers had yet seen the web as a place to publish, let alone to put their entire flagship product.

But it was a risky move, too. Digital sales rose, but slowly, while print sales fell off a cliff. The decline was dizzying: From more than , units in , sales fell to 51, in and to just 3, in , when I arrived. Britannica was sold to the Swiss investor Jacob E. Safra in , and I joined as a consultant helping to initiate the radical change Safra was looking for.

To adapt to market shifts, we had to make several major transformations that would ultimately cost tens of millions of dollars. The most painful one involved changing the way we sold our products. The Britannica direct-sales force was at the center of the business structure; the vast majority of company revenue came from this door-to-door army that fanned out across the world. But that sales method had become obsolete, so we decided to abandon it and adopt other forms of direct marketing.

We dismantled that part of the business in my first months on the job. As we changed our sales focus to direct marketing, we tested price points on the CD-ROM encyclopedia and realized that our original price was too high. Like many content producers, we had assigned a value to our product on the basis of content and production costs. But customers were changing. We began seeking new online revenue sources from subscriptions and advertising, and we tapped resellers such as AOL to bring the CD-ROM encyclopedia to new consumer channels.

Because our brand and the quality of our products were recognized and appreciated by educators, we focused on selling subscriptions to Britannica Online to colleges and later to the K—12 market as they came online. Though we were headed in the right direction, our CD-ROM business was still problematic, because margins continued to be whisper-thin in our competition against the free Encarta.

With our business declining, we could easily have justified eliminating long-tenured editors from a cost perspective. But editorial quality has always been intrinsic to our value proposition, and we knew that it would continue to differentiate us in a growing sea of questionable information. But internet access exploded, as we had expected and hoped , and the biggest threat to our company, the CD-ROM, was itself disrupted by online access, just when we needed it to be.

Britannica was able to reestablish a strong direct relationship with consumers, and our digital subscription business took off. Our next two major ventures on the internet—a free, ad-supported consumer encyclopedia and a misconceived learning portal for K—12 schools—ultimately bombed, but they allowed us to see that the internet was a far more favorable place to do business than CD-ROM had been. When I became president, in , I sought to transform the company once again in light of the opportunities that widespread internet access opened up to us.

What my staff and I realized was that we needed to go beyond reference products and develop a full-fledged learning business. Our growing K—12 customer base helped us by telling us what it needed: affordable lessons and learning materials, linked to the curriculum, that could be used in classrooms and at home.

We knew we had the brand and the editorial resources to meet this need. We saw a looming opportunity in online education, and we caught the wave perfectly. We hired dozens of new people, and we now have curriculum specialists in every key department of the company: editorial, product development, and marketing. I had been following Wikipedia since the launch of its parent project, Nupedia, in At the time, I thought Nupedia was going nowhere, because it was trying to do exactly the same thing that Britannica was, and I knew how much editorial staff and budget it took to do that.

It's looking like we will sell out — I imagine the remaining will go very quickly. Future editions of the Encyclopedia Britannica will be available only online, despite the popularity of the final set. The Encyclopedia Britannica has its roots in 18th-century Edinburgh, where printer Colin Macfarquhar, engraver Andrew Bell and scholar William Smellie decided to create an encyclopaedia which would be arranged alphabetically, "compiled upon a new plan in which the different Sciences and Arts are digested into distinct Treatises or Systems", with its chief purpose being "utility".

The current edition features 65, articles written by 4, contributors, including Ian Rankin, Desmond Tutu and Bill Clinton. This article is more than 9 years old. The year-old publisher is inundated with orders for the final edition of its volume set, with only copies remaining.