After 244 Years, Encyclopaedia Britannica Stops the Presses
Source: New York Times
After 244 years, the Encyclopaedia Britannica is going out of print.
Those coolly authoritative, gold-lettered sets of reference books that were once sold door to door by a fleet of traveling salesmen and displayed as proud fixtures in American homes will be discontinued, the company is expected to announce on Wednesday.
... The oldest continuously published encyclopedia in the English language, the Encyclopaedia Britannica has become a luxury item with a $1,395 price tag; it is typically purchased by embassies and well-educated, upscale consumers who feel an attachment to the set of bound volumes. Only 8,000 sets of the 2010 edition have been sold, and the remaining 4,000 have been stored in a warehouse until they can be purchased.
The 2010 edition had more than 4,000 contributors, including Arnold Palmer, the professional golfer (who wrote the entry on the Masters tournament), Jack J. Lissauer, a space scientist at the NASA Ames Research Center (who wrote about extrasolar planets), the professional skateboarder Tony Hawk (skateboarding) and Panthea Reid, professor emeritus at Louisiana State University and author of the biography “Art and Affection” (Virginia Woolf).
Read more: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/13/after-244-years-encyclopaedia-britannica-stops-the-presses/
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