I am going to join those in the interwebs eulogizing the Encyclopedia Britannica’s print edition – after 244 years, it’s going online-only.
I actually own a print edition of Britannica. I don’t have it with me here in Korea, obviously – it’s in storage, with my 4 or 5 thousand other books. It’s not exactly a recent edition. It’s 1950, I think – I bought it, used, from a Salvation Army thrift store in Minneapolis. I would estimate probably read about 40% of it.
Reading encyclopedias is an old hobby, for me. We had a World Book Encyclopedia when I was a child, which I’m fairly certain I read from A to Z when in my pre-teens – but not in order (which is why I’m not really certain if I read the whole thing). One thing I miss about paper encyclopedias, when using Wikipedia (which I also love, nevertheless), is the ability to just keep reading: the article following the one you’d come to the encyclopedia for, and the one following that, and the one after that. This is not, in fact, something that’s not possible with Wikipedia – it’s actually only a design choice, that could be easily remedied, by adding prominent (or not-so-prominent) “next article” and “previous article” buttons to each Wikipedia page. But they choose not to do that – and it’s a loss, in my opinon. Nevertheless, I had another habit with my paper encyclopedias that’s quite easy to simulate with Wikipedia: I would take down a volume at random, and open it to a random page, and begin reading; Wikipedia’s “random article” button provides the same result. I use it many times every time I’m online.
A while back I began writing a blog entry about my weird relationship with Wikipedia. At the time, I wanted to focus on why it is I don’t write for Wikipedia anymore. I used to. I had some writing associated mostly with geography topics, and even originated a few articles in English Wikipedia on Mexican towns and municipalities. The short answer as to why I quit writing for Wikipedia is that I’m lazy – their standards for reference and citation grew gradually more stringent than I was willing to work with. But the long answer (or rather, the psychologically more insightful answer) is that I got tired of writing what I thought were well-referenced and well-cited articles and having others changing what I’d written beyond recognition. So I’m happy at this point to read other people’s writing. I’ve become a passive consumer of the output of egos less fragile than my own.
To return to the loss of the print edition of Britannica – I think it’s a little bit sad, because of my history with encyclopedias. But I understand it, and I’m not going to launch into a luddist lament. I think that technologically, we’re not far off from where we can turn any electronic content into a paper book whenever we have the urge to have a paper book – there are already automatic book-publishing devices out there (see this recent article and picture below).
