Daniel Mayer (maveric149@yahoo.com) [060325 00:02]:
--- David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
http://store.britannica.com/jump.jsp?itemID=114&itemType=CATEGORY&iM... You can get the full Britannica DVD for US$25!
How they can continue to improve their product and make a profit with those prices is a bit concerning.
Simple answer: they've been in the red for fifteen years ... they're currently privately held by a rich enthusiast. (Sort of like British car companies, which are regularly bought by a rich enthusiast who rapidly becomes rather less rich, then selling it to another rich enthusiast ...)
Hopefully this is just a special and not a sign that EB is becoming desperate in the face of Encarta and the growing use of the Internet as people's first stop for reference information.
I'm telling everyone I know. I really want to see EBI's faces when all these people buy an EB DVD and tell them they heard about it from Wikipedia.
BTW, I a bit disappointed in what I got ; all this time weve been putting Britannica on some kind of pedestal and yet almost all the articles Ive looked at were stubs whose only value to me would be to help improve lead sections in our articles. And most of those had corresponding Wikipedia articles that were longer, often much longer. Length and size are not everything (accuracy for one is also very important), but I was expecting more meat for something I pay for.
A lot of EB's reputation is mystique: who can afford US$3000 for the legendary encyclopedia? But lots of people can afford $25. From what you say, they might be surprised to find how good it really is or isn't.
Don't take my word for it ; buy the DVD and see for yourself. It certainly is worth the money now and something almost all of us can afford. You should also consider buying the Concise edition - it is great reference to check against to make sure lead sections cover the most vital points of a topic. I've found that EBs introductory sections in their regular articles are not a good model for our lead sections.
The point for me in buying the Concise edition is that it's the sort of thing we'd want from a single-volume Wikipedia 1.0, so may be a useful model in terms of paper per topic and so forth.
- d.