How The Web Ruined The Encyclopedia Business 623
prostoalex writes "Don't remember an encyclopedia salesman knocking at your door lately? Turns out, fewer Americans are purchasing layaway plans for heavy-bound multiple-volume sets (once sold at $1,400) and turning to the Web for answers, according to AP/Miami Herald. What's more interesting is that even the software encyclopedias are not selling as well, with Google changing the landscape of finding good reference information. 'Microsoft's $70 Encarta is the best seller but industrywide sales for encyclopedia software fell 7.3 percent in 2003 from 2002,' says Associated Press article."
Or maybe (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Or maybe (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Or maybe (Score:3, Funny)
Yep. My ex-wife has to be one of them. Coz she surely thinks she know everything
Computers are much better for looking things up... (Score:5, Insightful)
In the light of this I'm not surprised that the print sales are down. I'm perhaps more surprised that the electronic ones aren't doing better - results from the venerable Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] (generally) excepted, I'd trust an encyclopedia before Google for general basic research. It's not so much a problem for me, but young people don't have as finely tuned BS detectors as older folks; they believe anything they read on the net. It's near impossible to get them to limit themselves to peer-reviewed sources in their papers, and they really do come back with some absolute crap from some random website.
Parents would do well to consider this when weighing Google against a good CD/DVD-ROM or a subscription to britannica.com; it's a lot cheaper than the print version used to be, and it's guaranteed quality information. Google is an invaluable tool, but it doesn't replace traditional sources of information. (At least until Google Print [google.com] comes out of beta - then we really will be somewhere.)
Re:Computers are much better for looking things up (Score:3, Informative)
Regarding Wikipedia and trust, the "page history" feature on the left can help. Not only will the page history protect you against recent vandalism (i.e. in case you see a damaged page before someone has a chance to correct it); a frequently edited page with many contributors may be more reliable than a page that had less peer review.
Wikipedia and attribution (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Wikipedia and attribution (Score:5, Interesting)
Incidentally, my original intention on replying to this article was to mention that while I would not buy a paper encyclopedia, (the major benefits of the Wikipedia being: content flux; contribution; instant searches; massive amount of content along with an infinite space for growth) I would gladly give money to the Wikipedia. The latest fund drive for the Wikipedia generously exceeded its goals within hours, so obviously I'm not the only one.
If I may be bold for a moment, I'd also like to point out that the spirit of the first encyclopedia was to be knowledge of the people and for the people, so that everyone may be educated. If the web (again, a series of "ends") were available in the sixteenth century, the encyclopedia, I'd argue, would not have been published in medium as expensive, bulky and unportable as paper. When was the last time you sat down and opened the encyclopedia instead of using the web?
To read more about the concept of encyclopaedia in dozens of languages: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclopedia
Re:Computers are much better for looking things up (Score:5, Insightful)
That's really where the power of the internet is, as you point out - in the specialized reference engines that are freely available to just about any college student and most high school students. For home use, there are other specialized reference engines depending on what you want to look up (www.mdconsult.com comes to mind for physicians). But remember, we're talking about general information here, not writing a thesis - usually you'd use an encyclopedia just to get an the basic idea of a topic, something that a quick google scan or a free online reference site can almost always accomplish.
Students are supposedly taught English as well... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not still teaching myself, but I've heard a lot to suggest that the upsurge of the internet has exacerbated problems which were only starting to appear in my day. My girlfriend teaches final year school as well as third level, and besides the plagarism issue, many of her students just can't get it into their heads why a random page on the internet should not be given as much weight as an expert in the field. She has gone over it with them, but they are lazy - they want to use the internet exclusively for research as it's easy, whereas going to the library is too much effort.
Part of the problem is that here (in my experience- in the humanities), any half-serious research methodology classes only appear at the postgraduate level. It might be touched on slightly earlier in certain subjects such as history, if you chose a manuscripts option. I agree as to the importance: at a minimum it should be the *first* thing taught in university, and preferably should be introduced even further back in the school system. Research methodology is the humanities is like 'planning' in programming, and it's insane that it just isn't emphasised early enough.
Re:Computers are much better for looking things up (Score:5, Interesting)
I completely agree. However, I would also add that print indexes still retain an enormous value. I've often discovered a thread while browsing in an index that was perfect for the task at hand--and something I might not have otherwise thought to consider.
Re:Computers are much better for looking things up (Score:5, Insightful)
I remember in my childhood fondly looking through an encyclopedia from the 1930's,not because the information was necessarily the most useful because it wasn't current, but because it was a priceless snapshot of the era. It remains to be seen of the Internet will preserve this kind of snapshot of a time or will information always churn, so it is always current which is good for current research, but will it tend to develop some amnesia about the past. By this I don't mean it will lose the great works, because it wont, but will it preserve the smaller but still interesting details of each era.
The way back machine is a very noble effort at trying to preserve this kind of snapshot of the Internet but will it survive and build for 100's or 1000's of years like great books and libraries have?
Enlightened societies have fought hard to preserve books from destruction especially by onslaughts from violent and ignorant warrior cultures. The question is will we be both motivated and adept at preserving digital information. Books last 100's of years. Do we have digital storage media that will do the same or will have to rely on constant duplication of information to preserve it. It seems possible the Internet may preserve information intuitively because it tends to replicate and disperse useful information.
The other obvious problem with the Internet is it is causing an explostion in the volume of information which has to be filtered and preserved. Will the quality information lift its head above the sea of garbage when it comes time to preserve it. Google rankings tend to lift up the quality information but is that enough or do we need an army of editors to raise the valuable so it doesn't drown.
Re:Or maybe (Score:5, Funny)
I find that completely colorable. Kids' dilatoriness cause them to be parsimonious.
Re:Or maybe (Score:3, Funny)
I find that completely colorable. Kids' dilatoriness cause them to be parsimonious.
You must have the "Learn-a-word" toilet paper? :_)
Something that should've been in the original post (Score:5, Informative)
Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]. I'm sure everybody knows about it by now, but it's a great source of information for just about anything you can imagine.
Re:Something that should've been in the original p (Score:5, Interesting)
There is another option as well (Score:4, Informative)
ibiblio [ibiblio.org] has started a project recently called Wikinfo [internet-e...opedia.org]. They have a very similar look to the Wikipedia and even link to it for articles they don't have, but they have adopted a different editorial policy [internet-e...opedia.org]. Specifically, they have chosen to use a sympathetic point of view [internet-e...opedia.org].
Re:Something that should've been in the original p (Score:5, Insightful)
You are correct (Score:5, Informative)
Re:You are correct (Score:5, Insightful)
Problem is, would this lead to a tyranny of the majority? If something like Wikipedia were around in Gallileo's time, would it ever say that the earth is round?
Now, Wikipedia may very well have a method of dealing with this problem, but I am not aware of it. Can someone offer insights?
Re:You are correct (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:You are correct (Score:5, Insightful)
This is what gets the creationists and the flat-earth types all in a twist; they can't present credible evidence to the scientific community to support their claims, so they claim that there is some sort of conspiracy against them, when nothing could be further from the truth.
Re:You are correct (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:You are correct (Score:3, Informative)
This is oversimplified, but gets the point across. In addition, in some so-called 'soft sciences' (such as psychology) where there are few hard mathematical rules, than many theori
Re:You are correct (Score:5, Insightful)
This is known as the Problem of Induction. In a nutshell, it states that inductive logic is itself not valid; e.g., we can not make statements about anything unknown by looking at things that we do know. In addition, even our knowledge of the past and future are suspect; we have no knowledge that the past is static, and no proof that our estimates about the future will ever come to pass. We have no non-inductive proof that dropping a ball from a tower will cause it to fall, because assuming that the world will continue to work as it always has (e.g., previous balls dropped from towers did fall).
This can be handled one of two ways.
The first is that one can state that we can (and do) know absolutely nothing -- the universe could have been a fruitcake ten seconds ago, and changed form in such a way that we never knew it. Some deity could have created things; or the universe could have congealed out of Lime Jell-O. Logic is invalid and useless.
The problem with this viewpoint is that, if one were to really subscribe to it, there would be no point in making plans. No reason to even live; after all, you don't know whether or not your existence is itself real, or if it will just stop in a second when the universe becomes solid Jell-O again. This is not a very practical viewpoint, nor one compatible with our biology or psychology -- we inherently use past events to predict future results. Ever gotten sick from eating one type of food, and avoided that type of food in the future? Exactly.
The second way of dealing with the problem of induction is by making one assumption -- that things we have observed in the past did happen, and will continue to happen in the future. Note that this means that the events occur -- we may be wrong in our interpretation of said events. This is the principle upon which all of the knowledge of Man is founded, including science.
We can make a lot of measures in a lot of different times; we can apply statistical measures, making our theory more and more "scientific". But we can never say that it is absolutely "scientifically proven". Gravity at 9.8 can be the "best" Scientific explanation. This is totally subjective.
Any human viewpoint is, by this definition, subjective; we are not omnipotent nor omniscient, and therefore cannot ever see every single aspect of every single problem we encounter. We are limited to using the tools at hand; namely, our senses, and our ability to reason, which is derived solely from the assumption of pragmatism.
In fact, it is this admission that none of our knowledge can be 'truly objective' that renders scientific facts so strong. Whereas dogmatic sources of knowledge claim to hold perfect truths, scientific theories have the built-in intellectual credibility to allow for our human weaknesses. Scientific facts change as our understanding grows; they allow for us to make mistakes. In fact, the scientific process rewards those that find mistakes, and the greater the mistake, the bigger the reward. It is a self-correcting process.
Occam said that the simplest theory was the best. But is it really the truest?
What William of Occam said was that, given two or more competing theories with equal support, the most simple of all the theories is the best one to assume correct, because it will have less loopholes to check, and will be less likely to have mistakes. The important part is that the competing theories require equal evidence -- Occam's Razor does not apply in any other circumstance.
It's not a matter of being the, er, 'truest'; it's a matter of being the best theory that fits the data; shoul
Re:You are correct (Score:5, Informative)
Nice one. So you slip in Evolution with Junk Science, and hope that this makes you sound reasonable.
Evolution is taught as fact in the same way that gravity is taught as fact. The theory of Evolution is as valid based on our current evidence as the three laws of thermodynamics. Now Einstein came along and said "hey - what about this relativity thing I've come up with?" and lo and behold, Isaacs theories didn't go far enough. Does that mean we all float off into space because gravity doesn't work ? Does that mean I can't use a parabola to descibe the motion of a ball thrown through the air ? Nope. Same thing with Evolution. The evidence is there, and hundreds of scientific disciplines rely on this same evidence that supports Evolution for everything from dating ancient objects, to geological surveying and microbiology. Evolution happened... although the specifics of how are still very much under the microscope...
The suggestion that Global warming idea is on the same footing as the Theory of Evolution is a neat distraction, but it doesn't fly.
It's fine to doubt the integrity of specific scientists, or even the political process within the community at large - doubt is a good thing. But lets look at the evidence.. can you point to a specific failure ? Where did the scientific process fall down exactly ? Cold Fusion... nope, their peers caught that.. Global Warming, huh? Jury is still out on that one, waiting for more evidence...
No, I'm not buying it.
Even if the Theory of Evolution is completely wrong*, creationism cannot be pedalled as a scientific theory. There's absolutely no way of falsifying it. It's not testable, because it can never be revised upon discovering new evidence. It remains immutable, and evidence is routinely discarded or rationalized to fit the theory, rather than the other way around.
Creation-Science isn't science.
_______________________________________________
* it isn't.
Re:You are correct (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm going to assume that 'creational evolution' is another variant of the Intelligent Design argument[1]; the problem is that, not only is there no data backing Intelligent Design up, there is a huge pile of data contradicting the theory. It just doesn't hold up under any form of scrutiny. What's worse is that the Intelligent Design community intentionally
Re:You are correct (Score:3, Interesting)
Response (Score:5, Informative)
Re:You are correct (Score:5, Insightful)
D
Why would they have said it was flat? (Score:3, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Irony (Score:5, Insightful)
It's funny that somebody pleading for reliability in scientific knowledge believes that Galileo's unpopular theory was that the earth was round.
Nobody educated believed in the flat earth. (Score:5, Interesting)
"No doubt true?" It's an urban legend that it used to be generally believed that the Earth was flat. Eratosthenes successfully measured the circumference of the Earth around 200 BC. In medieval heraldry, only the Holy Roman Emperor could use the symbol of the "closed" or arching crown; everyone else had to use the "open" or pointy crown. This was because the Holy Roman Emperor's dominion was over the entire (spherical) world, which the dome symbolized. And persons living in seaports have always been able to see vessels coming up over the horizon. None of these were innovations in Galileo's time, and the idea of the spherical earth was hardly perceived as ridiculous or unacceptable.
I would also point out that Galileo died in 1642, a hundred and twenty years after Magellan's circumnavigatory expedition was completed!
Re:You are correct (Score:5, Insightful)
One is that you don't see the collective result of *everybody* peer reveiwing the entry - you are only guranteed to get the result of the last person who edited the entry. So if 1000 people agreed with an entry that said "X is true", and one person edited it to say "X is false", if that one person is the most recent person to have touched it, then *his* version of things is all you'll see. You're only guaranteed to see a version which is in agreement with the previous viewer's opinions, not a version that is an average of everyone's opinions that came before him. One person can wipe out an entire years worth of peer review on an entry in a single moment.
The other problem is that even if it does reflect accurately the opnions of all the 'peers' who reviewed it, the entry will then only be accurate in those areas where public opinion reflects the truth. This is often not the case when the public is poorly informed. I'd much rather read an encyclopedia article on nuclear power that was edited and approved by nuclear scientists than one that was edited and approved by a collection of J. Random Users. Science is one area where this can be a problem, and any area where stereotyping by the public is common is another. (For example, let's say I (an atheist) got invited to witness someone's pagan summer solstice celebrations. Before I decide if I want to do that, I'd like to read up on what those celebrations entail. I'd trust a source that I kenw was written by actual pagans on the matter before I'd trust a source that was written by the public at large, given that such a source is likely to contain incorrect stereotypes.)
Re:You are correct (Score:5, Informative)
2) You make two mistaken assumptions. (A) Not everyone edits all articles - people tend to stick to what they know. Therefore, articles are generally edited by informed users. (B) A lot of Wikipedia's changes (50%, if I had to guess) come from a relatively small pool of very active contributors (200 or so), most of whom are very well educated. If you look up an article on Nuclear physics, you'll probably get something that was written by someone majoring in/with a BS in physics or chemistry. So it's not PHDs, but it's not Joe Q Average either.
Ask and ye shall recieve (Score:3, Informative)
Re:You are correct (Score:5, Insightful)
Many middle-class households (the only ones who could afford a traditional print encyclopedia) bought them for their symbolic value: they showed that you were reasonably well-educated, that you valued education, that you could afford encyclopedias. They also bought them because of pressure not to "let your kids get behind" in an increasingly competitive academic environment.
These are precisely the reasons that many parents bought (and continue to buy) home computers. Just look at how personal computeres were marketed in the early 1980s, when it was not at all clear why you would want one. Look at how they are marketed to parents today.
Re:You are correct (Score:3, Interesting)
As I said in a sibling post [slashdot.org]: Not everyone edits all articles - people tend to stick to what they know. Therefore, articles are generally edited by informed users. (B) A lot of Wikipedia's changes (50%, if I had to guess) come from a relatively small pool of very active contributors (200 or so), most of whom are very well educated. If you look up an article on Nuclear physics, you'll probably get something that was wr
Re:Something that should've been in the original p (Score:4, Interesting)
With Wikipedia, there's the assumptions that there is at least a few people who might know something about a topic who happen upon it. Just because there's no "formal" criticism of the content doesn't mean that it doesn't get critiqued and fact-checked.
Google, on the other hand, has no fact checking ability. And, making things worse, for Google to fact check itself would ruin all of the reasons why people would want to use it in the first place.
So there's really no way to prevent somebody's kid from somehow managing to confuse neo-nazi websites for reliable sources while writing a paper about Hitler.
Re:Something that should've been in the original p (Score:5, Interesting)
I agree. I was contacted to block a website through our school district web filter.
www.martinlutherking.org [martinlutherking.org]
It's purely a hate/descrimination web site and the domain name [internic.net] is owned by a known white supremacist [stormfront.org] organization. But the kids that find sites like these view them as if they are fact! Kids don't do a whois search. It doesn't even enter into their minds that someone would post misleading and false information on the web. A simple Google search [google.com] turns up all sorts of "information" that points to this "factual" website.
Part of me needs to block it, but kids need to see this stuff too, otherwise they'll leave school and suddenly vast swaths of the web are now "unhidden" and they won't know what to believe. Maybe I don't give kids enough credit, but it's a troubling thought that our censorship of the web might be doing more harm in the long run, and I'm a part of that.
Re:Something that should've been in the original p (Score:3, Insightful)
Either you use the 'net as a source of information and teach kids how to discern good sources from bad, or you give up on the internet entirely. There's no trying to "fix" the internet. You could do some form of whitelisting and only allow access to an approved list, but that's basically the same thing as discerning good information from
Re:Something that should've been in the original p (Score:3, Funny)
Wikipedia rules!!
Wikibooks should do the same for textbooks (Score:4, Interesting)
Lobbying (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Lobbying (Score:5, Insightful)
A quote I have hanging on my wall:
That will only become more true as the pace of change quickens. Artificial scarcity be damned.
(Right beside that quote I've also got a few Singularity [kurzweilai.net] quotes, about the exponential nature of progress, and the likelihood [gmu.edu] of mankind surving these next few critical decades.)
--
in other news... (Score:5, Funny)
the candlemaker lobby are asking for sanctions to keep the vital candle market afloat.
Re:in other news... (Score:5, Interesting)
You ever read Ayn Rand's Anthem? If not you should, it's a really good book. As a matter of fact, one of the premises of the book was what would happen if there was a society more interested in the status quo and change (modeled after the commies). There were a lot of interesting points -- one of which was that light bulbs would never be made because the industry of candlemakers would be put out of business. And if you don't benefit your fellow man, you must be evil.
Sometimes I wish I were a literary nerd so I could explain things better. Oh well, here's [wikipedia.org] a link to a Wikipedia summary.
Re:in other news... (Score:4, Insightful)
I'll have to take your word for it. I've spent enough time reading Ayn Rand's ravings -- time I'll never recover. Her political writing vacillates between the blindingly obvious and the blindingly stupid, and I doubt her fiction is any more meritorious.
Re:in other news... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not a Randroid or an Objectivist, but I have read and enjoyed both Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead; her two first real novels, as I recall. Both were fantastic, and both made very solid points about a number of good things -- the power of the unfettered mind, the crime of stealing the fruits of one's labor, and the travesty of assuming that the best world is one in which everyone is equal. We need our geniuses, just as we need our burger-flippers.
The problem is, after these were written, Rand started buying into her own press. She started writing crap like Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. She took some good general ideas, and made very bad hard-and-fast rules of of them, completely ignoring any evidence to the contrary.
In this, Rand is an example of exactly how one should not handle criticism. Instead of reconsidering her viewpoints in light of constructive critique, she violently lashed out at anyone who questioned her Divine Word.
But that doesn't mean that she didn't have some good ideas.
Re:in other news... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:in other news... (Score:4, Funny)
Does anyone know of a way we could keep information up-to-date, remotely, without... say... mailing a new book every year? I bet such an invention would revolutionize the encyclopedia business.
Safe-for-work encyclopedias are still valuable (Score:5, Funny)
The saddest thing of all (Score:5, Funny)
Wikipedia (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course, one of the great things about Wikipedia is that you can read the editing history of the items, and see the
Obvious news tidbit of the day... (Score:5, Insightful)
Never before have the key values of resourcefulness and problem solving been so apparant in individuals and the work place, where before wrote memorized knowledge was necessary.
Having the internet, and refined resourcefulness trumps anyone who has wrote memorized anything. With the internet as a resource, instead of a 30 book bound volume set of encyclopedias, a resourceful person can find answers and implement them in minutes, where before it could take an hour to find information, and then more than a few hours to then find that information was OUT OF DATE.
i love the internet and everything it's done for me. I'm not a super genius, but being extremely efficient and resourceful, and knowing how to use google, has made me look like a fricken star both to peers and my employer.
-Jeff
Re:Obvious news tidbit of the day... (Score:4, Funny)
Such as remembering the proper spellings of homonyms. :)
Re:Obvious news tidbit of the day... (Score:3, Funny)
I'm not a super genius
Clearly.
Having access to information is a wonderful thing, but that access doesn't make the user somehow any more able to use those facts than they otherwise would have been. It simply means that you can copy-paste some text from a web site, not that you actually learn anything from doing so.
If you "look like a fricken star" then I'd have to say that your peers and employ
mastery (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, minutes to find the wrong info as well... (Score:4, Insightful)
So it's good from your point of view, but all to often someone that spouts how they 'looked it up' on google has no basis for the information they found.
A few nits to pick. (Score:5, Insightful)
Second, have you noticed that MS gives Encarta away with everything ?
Third: Duh! Universal free access to a worldwide information store is eliminating the need for large, expensive and quickly obsoleted books? My god stop the presses. In other news the Edison wax cylinder is no longer used in favour of a strange plastic disc read by lazers, wax salesman frieghtened.
Re:A few nits to pick. (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, it would be *far* more likely if Google had never come around. Google is the single driving force that has pushed and pushed at the other search engines to try and keep up ( sites like Teoma and the new Yahoo are getting closer in terms of accuracy, but Google has been at the top for so long now that it has found its brand name being added to the dictionary as a verb, and is constantly appearing in pop culture references like TV shows and Movies. You can't pay for that kind of advertising ).
If it weren't for Google pioneering the slick, streamlined search interface, the massive popup banners and "portal" monstrosities of AltaVista and Yahoo would still be the standard.. in fact, they would probably be even worse.
And thus, if it weren't for Google, searching for stuff on the internet would still be so incredibly painful and take so long that I could probably find it faster in the Britannica.
People just don't give Google enough credit. They totally revolutionized their space, and are still revolutionizing it( check out Google labs [google.com] if you don't believe me ). You don't see many companies doing that nowadays.
Re:A few nits to pick. (Score:3, Insightful)
The future of SE's is in distributed search & trust systems, which doesn't require a centralized Google to crawl the web to determine relevance based on link popularity. Much harder to game webs-of-trust than Pagerank.
--
Remember me? (Score:3, Funny)
Trust me. [x-entertainment.com]
Encyclopedia still useful though (Score:4, Insightful)
For very specialized knowledge encyclopedias are still useful, and it's hard (for me at least) to discount the pleasure of opening a volume at random and learning about something I never had the first idea about. Sure you can try the same trick with the web though I'm not sure the results would be the intended one...
For a while the Britannica was free online, but this is no longer the case.
In the future, veracity will be valuable (Score:3, Insightful)
Anybody can type anything and have it show up on the web. Most of the time, it is even well-meaning information, eg, with the intent of being accurate. The issue is that people sometimes make mistakes. When you're writing about who your favorite Pokemon character is, mistaking the stats of Pikachu for Megamonkey isn't that bad. When you're posting information about a medical procedure or tolerances on a shear pin, though, being wrong can literally be the difference between life and death. The advantage encyclopedias have over web content is that everything much pass peer review and fact checkers.
I predict that while the 'paper encyclopedia' business may suffer in the future, the businesses that generate the content may begin to restore revenue by offering information that is in digitally signed chunks of information that an end user can be sure of or by offering fact checking services for people who can sacrifice context for finding out if a specific fact is true. Maybe a publically available article about gunpowder will give me all the steps needed to safely make it, but I might then pay $.5 to ask an intelligent software agent at Brittanica.com to read the URL of that public article and tell me if it's accurate or not.
I love encyclopedias, and I think there will be a market for them well into the future (people still buy dictionaries, don't they?), but part of capitalism is keeping your business relevant, and it looks like the encyclopedia companies have some challenges ahead of them.
Your results may vary (Score:5, Funny)
I _WILL_ buy a printed set for my offspring (Score:4, Interesting)
1. they are still available
2. i actually end up with kids one day]
I spent a lot of time when I was 6-12 years old reading my parents encyclopedia's and old college textbooks from cover to cover. I can still recall a lot of things (over 20 years later) that I read when I was a kid that have stuck with me, without further exposure or reinforcement.
Actually, scratch #1 up there, if they aren't available, I'll find an antique set for them.
Re:I _WILL_ buy a printed set for my offspring (Score:3, Interesting)
Shocking! (Score:3, Funny)
decline in sales (Encarta) (Score:3, Funny)
RIAA claims decrease in Encarta due to illegal downloading and swapping.
in defence of paper encyclopedias... (Score:5, Insightful)
But, as a teenager, I got a full Encyclopaedia Brittanica from my grandmother as a gift. And the nerd in me couldn't keep me from picking up a random volume, leafing through it and waiting for something to catch my eye.
The variation on that would be that I'd look something up, and, in the process of finding the right page, some other entry would catch my eye and I'd read up on something (usually completely unrelated) after finding what I'd originally gone looking for.
Hypertext kicks ass. Ain't no arguing against that one. But search engines show you what you were looking for - it's a lot harder to 'stumble across' completely unexpected stuff on online reference engines. I ain't buying another paper encyclopedia, to be sure... at least not at the price my grandmother paid for mine... but, in the quest for pure, unadulterated trivia, there ain't nothing like it...
Encyclopedia salesmen (Score:3, Interesting)
Unfortunately, I remember encylopedia salesmen a bit too well. During mid 1980s I received an offer that said "free desk reference set if you respond". I responded and when the salesman went to schedule a sales appointment, I told him "you are welcome to come, but I have no intention of buying encyclopedia Britanica." He said then he wouldn't come. I pointed out that their offer still said, "free desk reference set" and this seemed like a fraudulent business practice. His response was, "then take it up with the FTC."
So, I wrote the FTC and the local BBB. I also sent a copy in care of "Presidents office, Encyclopedia Britanica". My letter didn't get any visible response from FTC or BBB, but I did get a phone call from the legal office at Encyclopedia Britanica. They carefully explained that what happened was not their policy. Shortly thereafter a local rep of Encyclopedia Britanica called to apologize, indicated that the salesperson had been fired and came to provide both a sales call and desk reference set. I listened politely, said "no thanks" and still feel bad for causing someone to lose their job.
Re:Encyclopedia salesmen (Score:4, Funny)
Don't worry about it. He's probably the CEO of a company like SCO right now.
At one time... (Score:5, Interesting)
I haven't used the DVD version, but I assume the articles are as good. By comparison MS Encarta is a joke. It has a lot of articles but they're half the length of Britannica's at best. The atlas is good though and is probably the killer feature in the 'Deluxe' version and it's the reason I own it.
I guess the ultimate encyclopedia would combine the articles from Britannica with the atlas from Encarta.
Still, neither of them is free. Happily Wikipedia has filled that vacuum quite nicely. I'm sure some of the content is pretty dodgy (or pointless), but it does benefit from a great breadth of articles and a keen team of volunteer editors to keep it going.
Freedom... (Score:5, Insightful)
1)The cost of printing. This is expensive when you consider the cost of 24 Hardcover books.
2)The cost of fact checking. Again, this is expensive, as your credibility relies on your information being correct.
With the freedom of information that the internet has provided us, (1) is a non-issue. (2) However, is still an important one. As we all know, just because its posted on the internet (in duplicate at times!) its not always true. In the end, you might just end up with what you paid for, or you might end up reading a factual, cutting edge lab study that was posted the week previous. Personally? I use wikopedia and everything2.com when im looking up something that piques my interest. When im writing a paper? I'm going to be hitting up a libray and dusting off an encylopedia. Sure i'd use internet sources (read:google) as a tool, but id be extremely carefull with my sources.
Persistence (was Re:Freedom...) (Score:3, Insightful)
Wasn't this one of the selling points of CD-ROMs? (Score:5, Informative)
For bound encyclopedias, it's a cost/benefit analysis. For $1400, you can get 2 1/2 years of high speed internet access, with pretty much all the information you can handle. Encyclopedias are just too expensive for what you get.
Encyclopedias should go digital (Score:5, Insightful)
Encyclopedias date very quickly (Score:5, Insightful)
With the Internet, I could have that information in a few minutes, even seconds if I find a good source. Encyclopedias just cannot compete with such instantaneous and nearly cost free knowledge.
James Burke has touched on this phenomenon is his latest series of books. That the explosion and specialization of knowledge has lead to where we are today, that no one really "knows" anything anymore and that as soon as something is discovered it is obsolete. Those that will prosper the most in the future will have skills that lead to them the sources of knowledge they require without the need to retain that knowledge for themselves (his theory).
A sad day... (Score:5, Funny)
Encyclopedias hold a special place in my heart. When I was entering college, some of my older relatives decided to dump, excuse me, bless me with their collection of encyclopedias from the early 80s. Ah, yes, these 15 year old fountains of knowledge would really be a blessing for me to get the most out of my college education.
Years later, as I was cleaning out the house, I came across a dusty pile of now 20-year old encyclopedias. I was going to throw them out, but then said relatives looked on me with disdain, at how I was throwing away their precious gifts. They said they would take them, rather than allow them to be thrown away. 2 months later, when they never came to pick them up, I threw them out. And they've never asked about them again. Although, knowing these relatives, they'd probably demand I pay them the "fair" value of the books. So, not what they'd be worth to someone who lives in the real world (absolutely nothing), but the price they paid for the books + interest + inflation. Gotta love family...
You THREW OUT books? (Score:3, Insightful)
2 months later, when they never came to pick them up, I threw them out.
No offense, but paper books have value, even if only as relics of a bygone age. But to think that you threw out a set of encyclopedias breaks my heart. Okay, so much of the information would be hopelessly out of date (geography, for certain), but there's still a LOT of useful info in even a 20-year-old encyclopedia, and it's criminal that you just threw it out. Didn't you at least think about donating to the Salvation Army or Goodw
On educating teachers (Score:5, Funny)
Teacher. Onyxruby, are you done already?
Me. Yup
Teacher. Really? Just where did you get all information?
Me. CIA
Classroom. Laughter breaks out.
Teacher. Your telling me you got information from the CIA?
Me. That's what I just said.
Teacher. Care to share this treasure trove with the class.
Me. Sure.
Teacher gets back there expecting to see that I'm bullshitting her. I show her:
http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/
Everything she wanted from per capita income to the number of tv's was in there. Look on her face went from sheer disbelief to righteous indignation as she started writing it on the white board for the whole class to read. I haven't looked back at encyclopedias since.
It's more than facts that need checking (Score:3, Interesting)
You also need checking that an entry reads well, makes sense, and is informative.
A few people have mentioned Wikipedia - my first experience of it came when someone on slashdot linked to an article in a comment a few weeks back.
It was an article about Tesla's Wardenclyffe Tower [wikipedia.org]. Not knowing what it was, but knowing Tesla was generally an interesting guy with some weird theories, I decided to have a look.
Go and have a look, and see if you can work out what the hell the Wardenclyffe Tower is, or what it is for. I was at least halfway through the article before I had much of a clue, and even then I don't think I was sure. That's just bad writing.
I love this part from the 3rd paragraph of the article:
Me: "Yeah, but you haven't told us what the function is yet!"
Too bad... (Score:4, Interesting)
Parents should really consider postponing their child's computer training and let them spend a few quiet afternoons with books. Besides, I want my kids to see computers as a tool to get things done, and not an end unto themselves(lest I create one more slashdot reader).
And no, I don't sell encyclopedias.
Web Is Incomplete (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd love it if Google and the Web were able to produce comprehensive survey articles and concise in-depth analysis. But, as much as is out there, and as good as some of it is, it's not yet a replacement for much of dead tree literature.
Just searching the indeces on SciSearch for articles gives a lot more references in technical areas than just searching what's been put on the web so far (what, maybe 20-50% of what's been produced between 1992-2004?).
Unfortunately, copyright restrictions will prevent my ultimate dream from being realized: having everything that has been published put on-line and indexed and freely searched and accessed. I mean things like Lord Kelvin's papers, the collected notebooks of Ramanujan, the latest edition of the New England Journal of Medicine, etc.
brittanica has been mishandling the web for years (Score:3, Interesting)
"Owning" perhaps the greatest body of encyclopaedic content at one point and:
1. Refusing to come up with a CD-ROM strategy, for fear of cannibalizing book sales. Encarta comes along and eats their lunch.
2. Refusing to come up with a web strategy for many of the same reasons. The Internet itself eats their lunch.
3. In their defense, they did eventually try to come up with a number of ways to sell/license/share the content, but they were unwieldy and involved dividing the information into about 9 different online/CD/library/educational properties (I'm not kidding). Even their developers could hardly keep them straight.
4. Along the way, they came up with a crazy homegrown network to deal with global access, user profiles, and content updates. From what I heard, it was cutting edge, but it essentially was an attempt to "Akamai" the content in-house. After spending many, many millions of dollars, they outsourced the hosting and management after all.
5. One of the early "Jedi masters" of Search Engine Optimization spent considerable time and effort advising them on how to optimize their site. They made this a back-burner job for about a year, and eventually declined to execute it. Had they executed this correctly, today the entire body of content would be well-googled and highly ranked, giving them traffic potential revenue streams (if they hadn't eventually just closed ranks and made the whole thing a pay site, of course.)
6. Instead, they spent their time and money on things like this: paying $150k per month for a tiny text link on lycos' home page. I know a bunch of companies blew money on things like this (usually with AOL extracting the cash) but they were literally re-strategizing several times a year, and throwing out millions of dollars worth of development hours.
With all that said, it's really too bad, because I found that the developers and some editors are among the most brilliant people I've encountered. For the most part, they had educations of a completely different caliber (MIT, Oxford, Carnegie-Mellon, etc.) but were surprisingly down-to-earth, not name-dropping their Universities in the first 12 seconds of your conversation, for example.
Sadly, the management did not fit that mold. Privileged, self-righteous, cocky, arrogant PHBs. Piss away $millions a year on aforementioned goose chases and blame it on everyone else. I think the only reason it went on like this (and still does) is because the entire operation is owned by an 85-year-old Swiss billionaire who really doesn't seem to care about it, and the executive team keeps him in the dark.
It doesn't surprise me at all to see it all dying, considering this was once one of the premier brands of the medium.
A lot of content is not free as in beer (Score:3, Insightful)
In this, non-porn searches are similar to porn searches: the good stuff costs. (Not that I'd know anything about this, of course!) Lexus/Nexus search, anyone?
Who did use encyclopedias? (Score:3, Insightful)
Anyone remember that long-blonde-haired teenage encyclopedia pitch guy in the late 80's? He was even more annoying than the Dell dude.
It was rather funny (Score:3, Funny)
I made three mjor steps when I came into this city (1) I found a woman and married her (2) she found a house and we bought it and (3) I tracked down an encyclopeadia salesman and bought a set.
Well - #3 was the hardest. I managed to find them but had to call long distance as I recall. Eventually this lead to a referal here in the city and a younge chap showed up at the door. He advised that he had to go through his speal. I advised I wasn't interested in his speal - I wanted to look at the covers and the color.
A few minutes later his jaw drops in AMASMENT and he askes "Do you mean you are really going to buy them?" to which I answered: "Well, if you ever show me the damn covers - yes!"
And he says something like: "The company says I always have to go through this speal... This is the EASIEST sale I've ever made!!!"
They only cost about 1 1/2 months salary. I still look at that set with pride. And they are used alot as well. Of all the investments I've made, my encyclopeadias are one of the best.
Speaking from experience as a contributor of sorts (Score:5, Interesting)
Based on this experience, I've decided that it's FAR, FAR easier to work on a Wikipedia article than one that would go in a commerical encyclopedia. Not just because there's peer review without any institutionalization required(someone reviewing generally reviews the article itself and not the database info), but because the amount of research any one person has to do is minimal for most topics; if you know something, you put it in, else you leave it open for the next guy and mark the article a stub. Eventually someone comes along who knows the bits that are missing, and the article is completed with a minimum of tedium on everyone's part. The articles that nobody knows about, you can post bounties for, and eventually someone brave and passionate about the subject will take on the adventure of searching through dusty archives in the real world looking for the letters or documents that would give him material for an article. There's not really any commercial interest to spoil this picture, since it's all entirely voluntary.
Vandalization is less of a problem than one might think; if the article is simply turned into whitespace, you roll it back from the history, which covers 100 edits IIRC. If there's bad information, someone had to work hard to come up with it and put it there; it can't be done on a massive scale like other forms of Internet abuse, and it takes at most an equal amount of effort to give the bad information a place as a "minority viewpoint," and much less to just roll the page back. If rival factions fight over an entry, then either it gets hammered out over time into something acceptable to both sides, or it gets locked.
However, I admit that I still am hesitant to cite Wikipedia as a source, and turn to the library's Britannica for all my encylopedia citations and fact-checking, just because of that "you never know" tendency. It'll probably go away as the Wikipedia becomes better developed and respected. I know that the development of Internet citations took a similar path while I was in school. In middle school(the mid-to-late 90s), the Internet was still "new enough" that many teachers just banned citing from it outright. Later, by high school, they had developed lists of trusted sites to access. Now in college, I can feasably cite anything I want off the Net if I think it's trustable, but most of what I end up using are official documents in PDF format from some research or government group, because they all post them online these days. Wikipedia citations will probably follow in a year or three.
They don't play to their strengths... (Score:3, Insightful)
Mainly, what I'd like to see is encyclopedias that have a large variety of extensive multimedia. One picture for each topic doesn't exactly cut it... If I could look up "Ferrarri" and find 30 minutes of video-clips, along with plenty of audio recordings, and really detailed information on the cars, I'd be happy to buy the CDs/DVDs, because it's not easy to find that information elsewhere. Unfortunately, digital encyclopedias just tend to be a digitized version of the physical encyclopedias, with an audio clip thrown in here and there.
Who Next? Lexis Nexis (Score:4, Interesting)
Could we ever see it git rid of paying for electronic information?
Will Google or some search engines ever create an "Oraganized factual" area that does the equiv of Lexis Nexis.
This will be very interesting over the next 20 years.
Most software geeks don't need or use Lexis Nexis, however, if you've ever supported a large legal office, you know all about it, and how expensive it is.
encyclopedias worse than MS Ofice racket (Score:3, Informative)
There simply isn't that much new information created in a given year or group of years, and what does happen is generally quite easy to find online for the first couple years after its occurance in contemporary news form.
Even small to medium sized libraries aren't likely to buy a new encyclopedia edition every year, 2 years, or whatever. My parents still have an enyclopedia set from sometime in the 1970's that is pertinent for a very vast amount of the information you might want to look up. Granted, some of the scientific information is a bit dated, as is the "history" that has occured in the last 25 years, but that's a relatively insignificant amount of time and knowledge.
I have a copy of Encarta from 1995 that is still more than capable of providing more information than Id likely need for a given topic given cursory interest, when and if I'm unable to find the info online.
Re:Suprising? (Score:5, Funny)
the web has my blog. britannica doesn't. the web is winning. isn't it obvious what people want?
Re:What will save the industry (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What will save the industry (Score:4, Insightful)
My motivation for home schooling would be that I disagree with the curriculum of public schools and the bureaucracy of standardized testing. However, I also worry about friends and socialization. This is probably a common dillema.
IMO, public schools do a terrible job of teaching history and literature, but they do a barely okay job at math and science. I also think the zero-tolerance rules at many schools create a very perverse and highly unnatural environment for socialization. However, home-schooling by conservative born-again submissive-women alcohol-is-hell-spawn Baptists, for example, would be no better. I can just hope I'm more competent than the state government and less bigoted than religious extremists.
To this end, a tangible off-line bound encyclopedia could be a good tool. A child can take a volume of an encyclopedia and just "soak in it." Flipping pages in a book can be a good discovery experience. Just googling for a topic can be less rewarding, because of the amount of time spent sorting through the chaff. As an adult, I can deal with this pretty well, but kids might have less intuition to know what is probably good information and what is bunk.
Re:What will save the industry (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What will save the industry (Score:4, Interesting)
Friends of mine started home-schooling their kid, after some terrible experiences with public schooling at grade 2. She's in grade 8 now. It was a big jump for them, and they were a bit nervous about it, but it's turned out great.
What surprises a lot of people, though, is how well socialized she is. She's gregarious, has friends from many age groups (rather than just those in the same grade she is), participates in lots of group activities (some of them organized with other home-schoolers, some classes like French or Spanish, some just general extra-curricular stuff). She's way more well adjusted than a public school kid like myself was at her age.
She decided she wanted to try public school for a year in grade 6. She stuck it out, but it was a generally negative experience. All it took was a couple of truly evil and ignorant teachers and the general prison-like atmosphere of public school to make her withdrawn and sullen. (She wasn't ready to sign on with a gang or anything, but the change was dramatic, and it took a while for her to regain her naturally more social demeanor). This was in one of the best schools in our city. Scholastically, she's ahead of her grade by a couple years in most subjects (I did some science with her last year, and went through two years of curriculum before hitting stuff she didn't know).
The poor socialization thing, from what I've seen, is pretty much a myth. If the parents are zealots keeping their kid out of school and away from people so they're not exposed to Evil Thoughts, then sure the kids going to be poorly adjusted. In a case like that public school may be their only salvation. But it's only like that if the parents make it that way.
And to keep this sort of on-topic, the internet is an invaluable resource for home schooling. There are a ton of sites dedicated to it, published lesson plans, and there is still the .edu domain out there. I used the internet heavily when putting together science lesson plans.
Re:In Other News... (Score:3, Insightful)
That's an analysis which has more to do with your standards for judging games, than on their respective quality. For example, complaining that the board version takes longer to finish seems a particularly... dubious criticism of something that's supposed to provide entertainment. ("I hate the extended version of LotR; it takes longer to watch!")
I don't have access to sales figures, but I'll bet that sales of tra
Re:Same thing... (Score:5, Funny)
I used to do that. Drove my younger sister nuts.
"What are you reading?"
"M."
"You're just *reading* the whole thing?"
"Yep. I really liked 'L'. This is the sequel."
"You are SO WEIRD!"