Sad. Encyclopedia Britannica was my first real purchase. When I was ten years old I inherited about $620 from my grandmother's half brother. I spent $400 buying a two year old set from a hippy uni professor who was going some place on sabbatical and needed to divest himself of a bunch of books. I read them from cover to cover.

Sad, sad, sad. Yet another step in the inevitable decline of books. I've been wondering lately how we would survive if some cataclysmic event were to wipe out the Internet, perhaps by turning off electricity supplies more or less everywhere^*. So much of our knowledge is tied up in technology now that, without it, we would take a perhaps insurmountable step backwards in a heartbeat.

^*I guess that's what I get for re-reading 'The Stand'

Encyclopedias are not what I would consider prime examples of the decline of books, as print editions are in some ways more similar to news papers or magazines. They attempt to provide current information on a broad collection of topics, but the current "digital world" allows for updates to be made to information sources in real time, as events happen. Print media is dated before it goes to the printers. And Encyclopaedia Britannica agrees:

“It’s a rite of passage in this new era,” Jorge Cauz, the president of Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc., a company based in Chicago, said in an interview. “Some people will feel sad about it and nostalgic about it. But we have a better tool now. The Web site is continuously updated, it’s much more expansive and it has multimedia.”
...
“We have very different value propositions,” Mr. Cauz said. “Britannica is going to be smaller. We cannot deal with every single cartoon character, we cannot deal with every love life of every celebrity. But we need to have an alternative where facts really matter. Britannica won’t be able to be as large, but it will always be factually correct.”

But one widely publicized study, published in 2005 by Nature, called into question Britannica’s presumed accuracy advantage over Wikipedia. The study said that out of 42 competing entries, Wikipedia made an average of four errors in each article, and Britannica three. Britannica responded with a lengthy rebuttal saying the study was error-laden and “completely without merit.”

Heh. But one cannot simply count errors, but should also take into consideration the types and scale of errors, and recently out-of-date data should be discounted from Britannica.

The other issue is the compendium's price: it is "a luxury item with a $1,395 price tag," not something widely accessible, except through libraries, and for the (relatively) wealthy who want to flaunt how they value knowledge.

We used to offer Britannica Online as a database option for our students. It was riddled with ads and I was glad to see it go.

Yeah, sad. When I was a kid we bought them one at a time in an installment program offered by the company. My great aunt was a saleslady for them. I loved flipping through them, the glossy paper, the interesting (sometimes boring) articles.