I think Brittanica's model *could* have worked if Wikipedia hadn't appeared on the scene.
I, revealing that I am an old fart, ( as if you couldn't tell by my cantankerous moods), bought the complete Brittanica when I was just a pup (more or less) and paid about $900 for it them.
(To you brits that's roughly in the neighborhood of 450 to 550 pounds).
This was about twenty *cough* years ago.
And I still have those. About 40 volumes with the Macropedia as well and a few annuals in case you know anyone looking for boat ballast.
I used to consult them more than daily. Now I consult them about once a month if that, usually when I find something strikingly bizarre in-project. Google Books has essentially removed any need to consult hard print anymore at least in *my* field.
At any rate, about ten years after I had purchased the set, they then came out with the full set on CD. But the catch, just in case people wanted to copy it and sell it or give it away free to their dearest friends, was that you had to also buy this hardware piece of woggle-mucky-mucky-junk whatever, that you plugged into one of your external plugs. Your computer saw that thingie bob, and said "Oh you have a legit copy". So they made sure there was no way to get it free.
That version had popped down to a measly $250. Of course they didn't have to kill any trees or pay guys to lug 100 pounds of books door-to-door to sell it.
After they had put their work up online, they realized that their ad revenue wasn't tip-top and to try to lure bloggers, they started giving away FREE subscriptions to online content creators. The details weren't clear, so I applied, and they gave me one. So I have been able to read the online content for free for a while, their intent being that I should cite, in my writings, to their articles, and thus get more people to click over into their content. Obviously to drive their ad revenue. But does this work?
One of the rather interesting problems with that is, I don't mind citing the EB for main references, but in today's world, we frequently cite many inline citations to incidental things:
"Yesterday in [[Arkansas]], a [[serial killer]] was apprehended declaring that she was driven by insanity and the prevalence of online [[pornography]]."
When citing in-project we can easily use the double-brackets, but when writing off-project, we have to cite to the full URL. So what does Wikipedia allow for this? URLs like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arkansas http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/serial_killer
What does EB use for this? URLs like http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/34888/Arkansas
another dumb move on their part.
I'm not going to *actually look up* the URL for every incidental article citation. Our project makes it easy to create incidental citations, because you don't have to actually *search* out each one.
Will Johnson