Are Encyclopedias The Slide Rules Of The Internet Age?
Growing up, we had a set of Collier’s Encyclopedia’s stored on a bookshelf in the basement – which was tremendously useful to be in looking up information for school reports. While I haven’t paid much attention to encyclopedias for years, it comes as no surprise to find out that the encyclopedia business is struggling to remain relevant. The big sets of books have pretty much lost all interest to consumers, who know there’s a big internet out there of information. While even CD-ROM based encyclopedias did well for a few years, they’ve also lost out to the internet. The surviving encyclopedia companies are still trying to figure out how to make online information pay – and they’re having just as much trouble convincing users why they should bother to use an encyclopedia, rather than just use the entire internet and a search engine as their encyclopedia of choice. Of course, the information in an encyclopedia is professionally edited and much more likely to be accurate. However, for many
