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. When Nupedia adopted the wiki technology and became Wikipedia the following year, it seemed to me like an act of desperation.
Like many disruptive innovations, Wikipedia was of lower quality: If it were a video, it would be grainy and out of focus. Did we believe that consumers preferred our reference material? Did we believe they were willing to pay for it? Not necessarily. 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.
Final chapter Photograph: Graham Turner for the Guardian. Mortimer Adler was responsible for the unusual structure of the Britannica's final edition, which took the largest single private investment in publishing at the time. He was succeeded by Mortimer Adler, who had long sought to spread education and ideals through his Great Books curriculum. It was divided into a Micropaedia of short articles, a Macropaedia of more in-depth articles, and a Propaedia that served as a topical guide and outline.
But that massive investment would soon be made irrelevant by the rise of computers and the Internet. In , Britannica created its first digital version; CDs featuring multimedia such as video and audio in addition to illustrations would come out by the end of the s, and the subscription-based Britannica Online appeared in People no longer needed to turn to a book to access the sum of human knowledge; indeed, no set of volumes could ever hope to contain that sum anymore.
When the Encyclopaedia Britannica was first published, however, it was still possible for one person to grasp much of what humans understood about the world. Inspired by that influential work, several Scotsmen in Edinburgh including the unfortunately named William Smellie decided to put out a set of three volumes that would provide information on topics ranging from anatomy to chimney-constructing to law to watch and clock work.
The first volume appeared for purchase on December 10, By the seventh edition, which appeared in twenty-one volumes from to , the basic form of the Encyclopaedia had become fixed: a reference work covering everything from general interest to biography to technical knowledge to science to arts and history in indexed articles written by known experts. True to its founding Enlightenment sensibilities, it sought to summarize all branches of knowledge and inform people about the known world.
And some nine decades on from that?
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