If only Wikimedia could buy out EB........cheap......Imagine!! Ec
Erik Moeller wrote:
Toby-
Jimmy Wales wrote:
So, this is pretty interesting. According to Alexa.com, Wikipedia is now more popular than Britannica.
We should probably keep in mind that Britannica is also available in print. In fact, that's the brand's traditional medium.
Encarta has very much harmed Britannica's print sales. Britannica counted on their brand name and image, but even many of their customers did not see why they would have to pay thousands of dollars for a paper encyclopedia when they could get a decent encyclopedia, plus lots of multimedia stuff, maps etc. for 100 bucks or less, and the whole thing would fit neatly into their back pocket.
Swiss investor Jacob Safra bought Britannica in 1996 (it's still based in Chicago), and the sales staff for the paper version was fired shortly thereafter. Since then the focus has been almost exclusively on the Internet and CD-ROM version, which was massively reduced in price and is now dirt cheap. For some time they even had the full text online -- remember, those were the dot com days.
Things are looking pretty grim for Britannica. Their Java-based software is a piece of crap, and Encarta has much better marketing. They still have their original content bonus, but even in terms of content they have massive weaknesses in some areas (for example, compare their article on circumcision with ours). I think the Britannica brand will live on, but in terms of competition we should be more worried about Encarta (and vice versa).
Regards,
Erik _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@wikipedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l