How many encyclopedias are sold each year

We were never a Britannica family. The salesman went away with no forms signed, leaving us to get by with what we already had: a mid-Victorian edition of Chambers Encyclopedia , Arthur Mee's Children's Encyclopedia , Pears Cyclopedia , the Vimto Book of Knowledge.

All had their drawbacks. The dozen volumes of Chambers had been acquired secondhand before the war and looked splendid in their gilt-lettered spines and marbled endpapers, but the source of the Nile was only one of many discoveries that came too late to be found in their pages. And while the Children's Encyclopedia undeniably belonged to the 20th century, and had pictures of biplanes to prove it, its sentimentality and capricious arrangement — not so much A to Z as M to C via Y — made it a poor source of information.

Pears had a nice frontispiece, Bubbles by Millais , and was good as far as it went one volume, so not very far. All I can remember about the Vimto book was that it was really just a pamphlet of odd facts and figures, and had a detailed engraving of the Vimto factory, smoking away busily somewhere in Lancashire. The Britannica would have been a vast improvement, but expense ruled it out.

And so we contrived to look down on it — for behaving treasonably and becoming "too American" in ways my father never specified, or for its role as an ornament in houses where, we were sure, nobody ever bothered to disturb its military uprightness on bookshelves that contained no other books.

Then one day my father's closest friend came to visit and announced he was about to buy the Britannica, just like that, and not because he wanted his family to do better than he had — he and his wife had no children — or because he imagined the books would enhance his social status.

He would buy the Britannica to read it from beginning to end, for no other reason than to be better informed. This mission impressed my father, who himself was no slouch as an autodidact, and from then on we saw the Britannica in a kinder light. My father's friend, Sandy Paterson, needs a little description, because almost nobody like him is still alive. Like my father, he left school at 14, served a factory apprenticeship and found work as a fitter.

They had a mutual enthusiasm for cycling, which was how they met in a small Scottish border town in the s when they were both far from home on a long ride; my father parked his bike against another outside a grocer's shop and went inside to find a young man standing on a biscuit box and declaiming a Burns poem to the shopkeeper.

In my father's words, "That was Sandy all over", meaning it was typical of somebody who talked with lively good humour to anyone he came across, who in his 50s could still jump on to the kitchen table from a standing start, who shot rabbits, who made violins as well as played them purely for the fun of both activities , and who dashed off high-spirited letters that made their recipients laugh.

He and his wife, who'd been crippled with arthritis as a young woman, lived in a small West Lothian village. 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. We believe news can and should expand a sense of identity and possibility beyond narrow conventional expectations. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier.

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