Monday, March 17, 2008

Survival of the fittest: online encyclopedia

Groliers and Britannica are reading the writing on the wall (read monitor) and it says "print doesn't pay" any more.

An Ideas & Trends article in the New York Times posts a dramatic bar graph illustrating the number of Wikipedia entries dwarfing those by print encyclopedias. That trickles down to more users; way more users that print users. Consequently, it looks as though there will not be a 2009 multi-volume print edition of Encyclopedia Americana (which our HS Library uses).

The article goes on to herald the golden age of a "newer kind of encyclopedia;" including the like of the recently launched Encyclopedia of Life...which IS pretty cool.

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