Pelpa wrote:add to this fact that with Britanicas going out of print and as GH noted they are being soaked up bythe market, all available printed copies, especially those that would have been made available to the dirt poor, would have put further out of reach.
...as I said, good riddance to the printed encyclopedia. Ironically, it reminds me of having a satellite dish or a mainframe computer.
As useful as the internet can be, and as useless also, it is pretty idiotic to celebrate the demise of any book.
I am not celebrating the emise of a book I am celebrating the obvious demise/evolution of the PRINTED book my friend...not knowledge. In fact I am celebrating the demise of what ought to have been a book of knowledge and was elevated to be a mark of affluence (as can be clearly seen now with collectors hording the last printed versions of the encyclopedia) .
As noted earlier I pointed to "online jornals and digital version of the encyclopedia volumes" all respectable all able to be referenced. In fact most universities have opened their libraries to the cyber space where information can be shared more borderlessly.
The knowledge remains the same, the way in which it is communicated has changed. see e-books see tablets see pdf version of articles.
Pelpa wrote:I am celebrating the demise of what ought to have been a book of knowledge and was elevated to be a mark of affluence (as can be clearly seen now with collectors hording the last printed versions of the encyclopedia) .
This and your original post suggest some deep-seated issues on your part, but have rather little do do with the actual subject at hand. Of all the putatively elitist "marks of affluence" that one could name, the EB just doesn't rank very high. If anything, it was a "middle-brow" thing, not something the truly elite used to prove their eliteness. Most importantly, it actually DID serve as an educational resource in the home--something that should never be looked down on--either at the time or in hindsight.
As for this current surge in demand/value, so what? Lots of things become more desirable when they disappear.
Pelpa wrote: In fact I am celebrating the demise of what ought to have been a book of knowledge and was elevated to be a mark of affluence...
As I said, an idiotic statement.
good grief man, this statement alone gives substance to my belief that your possession of a printed Britannica was just for show and not for gather knowledge...so disappointed.
Pelpa wrote: In fact I am celebrating the demise of what ought to have been a book of knowledge and was elevated to be a mark of affluence...
As I said, an idiotic statement.
good grief man, this statement alone gives substance to my belief that your possession of a printed Britannica was just for show and not for gather knowledge...so disappointed.
And your statement gives substance to my belief that you are prone to leaping to conclusions that are not necessarily correct. Nothing that Conor Dary has said here should lead anyone to believe that he ever possessed a printed Britannica.
tandfman wrote:And your statement gives substance to my belief that you are prone to leaping to conclusions that are not necessarily correct. Nothing that Conor Dary has said here should lead anyone to believe that he ever possessed a printed Britannica.
when in Britannica do as the Britannicans do. I took a page from your Britannica.
Pelpa wrote: In fact I am celebrating the demise of what ought to have been a book of knowledge and was elevated to be a mark of affluence...
As I said, an idiotic statement.
good grief man, this statement alone gives substance to my belief that your possession of a printed Britannica was just for show and not for gather knowledge...so disappointed.
And your statement gives substance to my belief that you are prone to leaping to conclusions that are not necessarily correct. Nothing that Conor Dary has said here should lead anyone to believe that he ever possessed a printed Britannica.
Correct. If anyone read this thread from the beginning would have read that our family owned a used World Book encyclopedia---that we bought from our school for 100 dollars---from which I spent many an hour reading, mostly just random reading.
In today's Chicago Tribune, Andrew Gyory, hardly an elitist unless a guy who can say:
In the course of my career, I have edited dozens of reference books — encyclopedias on environmental history, disability history and social movements, as well as on presidential elections, congressional investigations and great disasters in American history. Last month I published the Encyclopedia of Free Blacks and People of Color in the Americas, a two-volume set that will be one of the last encyclopedias I ever edit.
had an interesting and I believe accurate assessment of the demise of the printed encyclopedia and should make others think twice that sites like Wikipedia is the answer to everything.
Facts in isolation have limited meaning, but connect them to related facts and concepts and ideas and you create knowledge. The cross-referencing of articles — the links an editor provides to guide the reader to related material — is what makes an encyclopedia more than the sum of its parts.
With its millions of articles, Wikipedia dwarfs its dying print relatives in scope and size. It's also free. But it comes with a price:
The new mega-model of infinite encyclopedic content may well fail to surpass the old one of focused, interwoven material. As Wikipedia replaces the printed encyclopedia, it will not necessarily provide readers a better encyclopedia. Rather than evolve into a superior resource, it threatens to become little more than a profusion of scattered facts, anonymous articles and drifting bits of disconnected data. Without a guiding, human presence, this ever-ballooning reference will lack intellectual authority and scholarly cohesion. Perhaps we will have collected all the information "that now lies scattered over the face of the Earth," but it will be orderless, a haphazard cacophony of material. Unlike Diderot, we will not have collected or created knowledge.
There is some truth to what he says. But of course life has changed, and our ways of obtaining information, and the speed at which we obtain it, have changed too. The latter factor is critical. In the not-too-distant past, if I were sitting at a track meet, or at dinner with friends, and a question of fact came up in the course of ordinary conversation, unless someone happened to know the answer with certainty, you'd have to wait until somebody got home or to a library to look it up. And it might not always be convenient then to communicate that to everyone else who participated in the discussion.
I'm talking about stuff that could have to do with track (where did so-and-so go to high school), current events (who is now the President of Iraq), health/medicine (what are the symptoms of so-and-such a disease, and how do you treat it), public figures (how old is some prominent entertainer or politician), entertainment (who played the villain in some movie) etc. etc. This happens all the time in normal conversation, and today, I just whip out my BlackBerry, click on my Google icon, and I very shortly have an answer, which is usually accurate--certainly as accurate as a two-year old printed encyclopedia would be.
I say this not to denigrate the value of the Britannica, but to suggest that when we completely change the way we normally, routinely, obtain information, the economics of providing information the same way we did 50 years ago will inevitably change as well. I am delighted to know that the Britannica people are not yet going to disappear, and that an online version that has the same wonderful attributes that the printed version has always had will still be available.
Yes, it would be nice if it still made financial sense to produce a printed version of the Britannica, but the reason it doesn't has to do with all of the other information sources that are now available. If I had to choose, I would certainly choose to do without the printed Britannica rather than everything that I can find on the Internet.
While availability of knowledge has long been the privilege of the better off, it seems a little strange to see it as their badge. Have the poor fought for access to knowledge because it is a badge? I think not.
Now knowledge is more freely available than ever before. Possibly libraries and hard copies of encyclopedias are less important. That is something to cheer, for sure. But to cheer the down fall of a product that has been the mainstay of libraries throughout the world seems a little ridiculous. Is it EB's fault that your peers ripped out the best pages from their encyclopedias in the library?
Last edited by Daisy on Mon Apr 09, 2012 8:57 am, edited 1 time in total.
Daisy wrote:While availability of knowledge has long been the privilege of the better off, it seems a little strange to see it as their badge. Have the poor have fought for access to knowledge because it is a badge? I think not.
Right. Information has always been about making one's life better, in some tangible way. Some may have made a fetish out of all this--by developing big libraries of rare, leather-bound books--but this has always been a peripheral matter. (These folks had little interest in "impressing" their social inferiors; it was all about impressing their peers.) Since Gutenberg, the printed text has been a key emblem of the democratization of knowledge--with all the baggage that that idea carries (yes, there are bad books, blatantly incorrect books, and all the rest). In our culture, the notion of access to books/information has always had a deep popular resonance. Look at the history of the foundation of the first (private) libraries in the late 18th century and the following development of the public library...and the amazing Carnegie Library phenomenon of the late 19th & early 20th centuries. From Diderot's Encyclopedia to today's Wikipedia, the key idea has been democratic access to knowledge--and in this honored history, of course the EB has a very important place.
The positive take-away here is: " the Encyclopaedia Britannica is going out of print, insteadfocusing on its online encyclopedia."
Wikipedia is too 'coarse'. While EB was TOO refined (couldn't keep up with pop culture), and World Book was too '5th grade', it was the Colliers Enc that I bought in 1978 when my first child was born. BEST investment I ever made. And yes, the Annuals were awesome!
tandfman wrote:If you had instead bought him $750 worth of McDonald's stock, it would now be worth close to $100,000. That would have been a good investment, too.
That 100 Gs are just a bunch of fish. The CE taught him how to fish . . .
Marlow wrote:it was the Colliers Enc that I bought in 1978
Colliers was the my second major expense (after a car) after arriving in this country. When they went under and stopped producing the Annual, I was not too happy.
gh wrote:Your confrontational attitude is not appreciated here. Please take a day to think before you post again.
I realized that I never needed a day...I thought about it none-the-less and I realized that I posted something, was challenged with subtle insults and I retorted, then I was held to be confrontational.
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