It is the latest move Encyclopedia Britannica has made to expand its Internet reference services and move farther into educational products. The Encyclopedia Britannica announced on Tuesday that after 244 years in print, it would no longer be producing physical copies of its multi-volume book set.
The company said it will keep selling print editions until the current stock of around 4000 sets ran out. An online subscription costs around $70 per year and the company recently launched a set of apps ranging between $1.99 and $4.99 per month. The flagship, 32-volume printed edition, available every two years, was sold for $1400. The Encyclopedia Britannica, which has been in continuous print since it was first published in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1768, said Tuesday it will end publication of its printed editions and continue with digital versions available online. REUTERS/Courtesy of Encyclopaedia Britannica/Handout The current edition features 65,000 articles written by 4,000 contributors, including Ian Rankin, Desmond Tutu and Bill Clinton.A 32 volume set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica is shown in this undated publicity photograph released to Reuters on March 13, 2012. Starting out as a three-volume first edition first published in 1768 and completed in 1771, the Encyclopedia Britannica began to include contributions from the likes of Walter Scott, AC Swinburne, Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, Leon Trotsky and Harry Houdini. The Encyclopedia Britannica has its roots in 18th-century Edinburgh, where printer Colin Macfarquhar, engraver Andrew Bell and scholar William Smellie decided to create an encyclopaedia which would be arranged alphabetically, "compiled upon a new plan in which the different Sciences and Arts are digested into distinct Treatises or Systems", with its chief purpose being "utility". The editorial creation of the work cost 32 million exclusive of printing costs, representing the largest single private investment in publishing history up to. The Encyclopedia Britannica, the oldest English-language encyclopedia still in print, is moving to a digital-only format. "In the distant future we might do a limited edition once a decade, but there are no plans for that at the moment," added Hughes.
"I don't think we would go back to print on it, although we haven't suspended print entirely – just the 32-volume set," said Hughes (the publisher's print editions of reference books for students and young children continue). It's looking like we will sell out – I imagine the remaining 800 will go very quickly."įuture editions of the Encyclopedia Britannica will be available only online, despite the popularity of the final set. "But people have grown up with it – in the early days it was the mark of an educated household – and they wanted to get their hands on a piece of history, we think. "It's sold much quicker than normal – we haven't seen sales like this for a long time," said Hughes. When the announcement was made on 13 March that it would be the final set, there were 4,000 copies remaining, and that figure has now dropped to just 800, with expectations high of an imminent sell-out. There were 12,000 copies printed of the 32-volume 2010 edition, which fills almost a metre and a half on book shelves and weighs 62 kilogrammes.
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