Britannica
online
From shelf of books to wealth of clicks
OCT. 19, 1999
Today, Encyclopedia
Britannica takes an unprecedented step: it’s opening
up its contents online, for free, to anyone who wants to
access it. Why? is surely the question even eager potential
users of the service will ask.
In some ways, it makes sense. Since no one
is making any money on the Web anyhow, why not make all your
goods free in the hopes of attracting an audience and
creating brand loyalty for the future? (A spokesman for EB
said the company, since it is privately held, doesn’t
release sales figures of its printed and CD-ROM editions,
but one would infer from this move that this is intended to
drum up business.)
The competition charges in the
neighborhood of 50 bucks a month for online use of the
encyclopedia, unless of course you buy the multimedia
version, in which case they throw in the online version for
free. So for schools and families alike, this could be a
much-visited destination.
What you get online is not exactly what
you’d get on CD-ROM. All the multimedia twists and intense
graphics aren’t online, at least not yet, until the
bandwidth is more accomodating, said Kent Deveraux, a senior
VP at the service. So there is still incentive left to
purchase it. What the editors have done is add frequent news
feeds (from the Washington Post, for example) and content
from magazines like Esquire and Sports Illustrated to
broaden out the historical perspective offered by the
Britannica.
“Maybe we don’t have something about
Ricky Martin in the encyclopedia,” said Devereaux, who
added that the company’s mission is to make Britannica
“the trusted knowledge destination.”
Typical Web executive hyperbole? Perhaps.
But in the short term, even the clumsy interface to navigate
Britannica online version is a great resource in the
enormous sea of information available online. Arguably, the
notion of an encyclopedia is a bit arcane in the age of the
Web — the entire Web is the world’s largest
encyclopedia, no? But for quick searching, it can’t be
beat.
They even anticipated misspellings of the
name, and purchased the mistakes as backup domain names.
Now, that’s forward-thinking Web planning.
also...
Overloaded!
OCT. 20, 1999
Britannica.com “victim of own success”
After the announcement yesterday about Encyclopedia
Britannica opening its information bank to the world by
making its contents free on the Web came the deluge of eager
knowledge-seekers. So many people surfed to the site to take
a look that the site has crashed!
Ironically, and unfortunately, the
subscription component of the venerable encyclopedia
publisher,http://www.eb.com/
is still up and running.
The CEO of Britannica.com just sent out
this alert, which we excerpt for you here, since we’ve
received a number of inquiries from readers wondering if
there was something wrong with their computers.
Britannica.com assures us it’s their computers, not yours.
“In many ways, we have truly been
victims of our own success,” reads the note from Don
Yannias. “We knew that the site would attract a
significant number of users in its first day of operation,
but we had no idea that this volume of traffic would be
achieved so quickly. In spite of the problems that we are
experiencing, we are encouraged by the high demand for
Britannica.com, and believe that you will soon find the site
to be the best source for information on the Internet.”
A spokesman says the problem should be
fixed in the next 48 hours.
Related Links:
Britannica
Grolier
Encarta
Worldbook
