The death of Encyclopaedia Britannica: No big deal?

The leather-bound compendium of all knowledge has struggled to compete with Wikipedia. While some are in mourning, others say good riddance

The Encyclopaedia Britannica
(Image credit: www.britannica.com/)

Encyclopaedia Britannica announced that it is going out of print, ending a 244-year run. Once the world's preeminent font of facts, its gilded volumes attesting to its supremacy, the encyclopedia fell on hard times with the rise of the Internet. Unwieldy and often outdated — the last print edition chronicles 2010 and weighs 129 pounds — Encyclopaedia Britannica could hardly compete with the living, breathing animal that is Wikipedia. But as the print edition goes gently into that good night (it will continue as a digital entity), the nostalgia-prone are treating its passing as particularly tragic. Is it really that sad?

Yes! Those books were special: Sure, Encyclopaedia Britannica died "under its own massive, printed weight," says Cassie Murdoch at Jezebel. In this age of "Wiki everything," we'll "survive just fine without it." But "until they find a way to recreate the experience of holding the weighty tome in one's hand and inhaling the almost ancient smell of Encyclopaedia Britannica through your electronic device, we can still rightly sulk about the death of these classic books."

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