BBC<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/strong> reports.<\/p>\nThe firm, which used to sell its encyclopaedias door-to-door, now generates almost 85% its revenue from online sales.<\/p>\n
It recently launched a digital version of its encyclopaedias for tablet PCs.<\/p>\n
“The sales of printed encyclopaedias have been negligible for several years,” said Jorge Cauz president of Encyclopaedia Britannica.<\/p>\n
“We knew this was going to come.”<\/p>\n
Companies across the globe have been trying to boost their online presence in a bid to cash in on the fast-growing market.<\/p>\n
Various newspapers, magazines and even book publishers have been coming up with online versions of their products as an increasing number of readers access information on high-tech gadgets such as tablet PCs and smartphones.<\/p>\n
Britannica said while its decision to focus on online editions was influenced by the shift in consumer pattern, the ability to update content at a short notice also played a big role.<\/p>\n
“A printed encyclopaedia is obsolete the minute that you print it,” Cauz said. “Whereas our online edition is updated continuously.”<\/p>\n
At the same time, frequent users of the encyclopaedia said they preferred using the online version more than the print one.<\/p>\n
“We have to answer thousands of questions each month through chat, through telephone, through email and we have to do that as quickly as humanly possible,” Richard Reyes-Gavilan of Brooklyn Public Library told the BBC.<\/p>\n
“In many instances doing a keyword search in an online resource is simply a lot faster then standing up looking at the index of the Britannica and then finding the appropriate volume.”<\/p>\n
Encyclopaedia Britannica, the company, has largely moved away from its encyclopedia work focusing most of its energies in recent years on educational software.<\/p>\n
Photo: Joi Ito (Creative Commons License)<\/span><\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"After 244 years reference book firm Encyclopaedia Britannica has decided to stop publishing its famous and weighty 32-volume print edition.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":168104,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tstyn_error":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[39291,39292],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/168100"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=168100"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/168100\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/168104"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=168100"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=168100"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=168100"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}