These days, many of us live online, where machine-generated content has begun to pollute the Internet with misinformation and noise. At a time when it's hard to know what information to trust, I felt delight when I recently learned that World Book still prints an up-to-date book encyclopedia in 2023. Although the term "encyclopedia" is now almost synonymous with Wikipedia, it's refreshing to see such a sizable reference printed on paper.
[...]
Its fiercest competitor of yore, The Encyclopedia Britannica, ended its print run in 2012 after 244 years in print.In a nod to our present digital age, World Book also offers its encyclopedia as a subscription service through the web. Yet it's the print version that mystifies and attracts my fascination. Why does it still exist?
"Because there is still a demand!" Tom Evans, World Book's editor-in-chief, told Ars over email.
[...]
A World Book rep told Quartz in 2019 that the print encyclopedia sold mostly to schools, public libraries, and homeschooling families. Today, Evans says that public and school libraries are still the company's primary customers. "World Book has a loyal following of librarians who understand the importance of a general reference encyclopedia in print form, accessible to all."
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 11, @07:42PM (7 children)
At home we had, I think, the 1972 version? The salespeople in the 70s must have been pretty amazing because a lot of people bought a set during that time to have at home. Back in those days our social studies papers were just paraphrasing of World Book articles, since we didn't have the Internet back then to copy from.
(Score: 4, Informative) by istartedi on Sunday June 11, @08:09PM
We had the 1958 version, with a few supplements that went in to the JFK administration. They had a few things in there that would be highly offensive now, such as Black children eating watermelon in a field. Even as a kid in the 1970s I knew that was a stereotype.
That set was either purchased or gifted from a friend or private seller. I really don't recall what my parents did to get it, but I was with them and vaguely remember us getting them from some stranger's basement, me not really understanding what the books were at first. The throughout my childhood, they filled many a rainy day with random page turning, served as research material for reports and a jumping-off point for high school papers where we were expected to do more digging at the library.
We finally sold them on at some point, probably at a yard sale along with 20 years of National Geographic. I don't regret that too much, because I moved several times after that, including a cross-country move. That stuff is heavy.
The World Book had a lot of things that are ingrained in my memory. One of them is Bird in Space, a modern sculpture by Constantin Brâncuși. So simple, and yet really managed to look just like what it said. So when I found out it was in the National Gallery I had to go see it, and you know what? The real 3-d version was actually kind of disappointing. I thought it would be like a solid feather, but it had an almost round cross-section. I also found out there were many copies. The exhibit showed the "evolution" of the form though, starting with something obviously bird-like and becoming more abstract. That was interesting. Later I learned it was also the subject of a legal case. [wikipedia.org]
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 3, Disagree) by aafcac on Sunday June 11, @08:38PM (4 children)
That's the main issue with them, they were organized by alphabetically by topic, so they'd go out of date pretty much immediately. I think they'd have continued to be relevant far longer if they would have had a separate index and much smaller per year volumes for each letter with the volumes being concerned every few years.
But, at the end of the day, a fixed book covering a changing subject matter is going to have a hard time completing with more regularly updated alternatives.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by looorg on Sunday June 11, @09:40PM (3 children)
Some topics become outdated. A lot of them don't or the changes are so minor that it doesn't matter much or what is in the book is still valid in some regard.
I have a framed world map on the wall in my office. It's horribly out of date in that regard, it's so old that Russia is stilled called the Soviet union, perhaps it will become modern again if I just wait long enough. So while out of date it's bad in that regard, but as as a projection of the planet it's still valid and good. The landmasses are approximately still the same shape(s) and such. Cities and large geographical landmarks are still there. Borders and names of countries might have changed a bit, as mentioned. But beyond that it's still valid as a representation of the planet, if you don't want to go in to the various projection issues with map making such as Mercator and how things get squished or elongated here and there.
A printed book is in that regard a solid reference. Once printed then it won't change. It can be referenced. While a digital copy can change at a seconds notice, hopefully there is a visible change log but that is far from guaranteed, not to mention the near endless and pointless Wikipedia and Wikipedia-style edit wars between various editors (and bots). You can never guarantee what is considered the current digital truth in that regard.
So while the printed encyclopedia will be outdated on current affairs topics and such. For most of the basics it's still valid or at least ok unless the book is so old it's an antique (but there might be things that are still ok). Which is I guess what people that home school etc use it for. That or it's just something that people have in their bookshelves to try and impress other people.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by aafcac on Sunday June 11, @10:04PM (2 children)
Indeed a lot of it won't be outdated because it's already historical fact when the volumes are printed. The problem though is that there's a lot of stuff that is ongoing or will change and having an encyclopedia that's increasingly out of date is a bit of an issue. I remember when I was a kid having to deal with encyclopedias that were out of date due to how fast things were changing. IIRC, we had a couple of world book encyclopedias of different years, and for historical stuff that was fine, but restricting yourself to just things that are increasingly old kind of renders the whole bit of having an encyclopedia moot. Sure, you can get information about old stuff, but that stuff already has a ton of sources of information anyways. The newer stuff, may not yet have many alternatives than the most recent edition.
The bigger issue though is how long even this is going to be viable, we're down to just one printed encyclopedia and that's going to be increasingly hard to justify over time as the market continues to dry up.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Monday June 12, @11:25AM (1 child)
That is an issue. I guess they could move to a sort of print on demand setup. But it might be hard to pay all those researchers and writers on that business model. But perhaps then price will go up, institutions that have their books might drag on replacing them and then they are in a deathspiral of sorts. If they are not there already, but it seems to be ok for them for now since they are the last hardcopy one standing.
Also with only one encyclopedia you run the eventual risk of knowledge monopoly, that it's their truth that is the only one. Perhaps less of a risk here as there are others, just not in printed form.
Since it's in English it should be sort of good for most of the western world language wise. Problem might be it takes a few years for the non-english speakers to reach the language levels for it to be useful. Also content wise it might be more iffy since most of the market might not be very interested in the historical aspects of the print or their own history will be more or less wiped out by it, I assume here that large american and english encyclopedias don't spend a lot of time on historical events in smaller or non-english speaking countries (how much do they go into the history of say Denmark or Belgium or ...) which might have gotten larger sections in local versions.
Smaller languages and countries have probably already collapsed as a market, I would imagine they have already gone digital to as their market is so much smaller. If they don't get hefty government subsidies to keep a local copy around.
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Monday June 12, @12:46PM
I do think that these are going the way of the rotary telephone regardless, which is kind of a shame, but between the physical size, the expense and needing to buy new ones every few years, it was pretty much inevitable. It's kind of amazing that they hung on this long as the last century has been a period of massive change that doesn't seem to be stopping.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 12, @12:34AM
The friends down the street had World Book and I was a little envious because it was a lot easier to use for early grade school assignments. We had Britannica (early 1960s version) which was quite a bit larger, and started to show it's worth in high school. One good thing it taught me was how to use a detailed index -- the Britannica index was a whole volume and we came close to wearing out the binding on it. It also had a detailed list of all the article authors and their credentials, sometimes interesting to see who wrote what.
I can barely imagine creating that index by hand, it had so many interesting cross references to articles that were (on first look) very far from the thing I started looking for. In hindsight, it probably helped to give me the "multi-disciplinary" outlook that I bring to my work today.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by EEMac on Monday June 12, @12:54AM (2 children)
It's about kids browsing, discovering, and learning new/random things. And *all* the entries try to be comprehensible by a child with a reasonable grasp of English.
If I had a kid, and they liked to read, I'd buy one (1) printed set. There's a small but ongoing market here.
(Score: 2) by corey on Wednesday June 14, @12:31AM (1 child)
I’ve got young kids and am interested so I went and looked up local pricing. It’s AU$2200 (~USD1500). That’s just a bit too much for me. I’m about to drop almost that much on an oscilloscope.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 14, @02:12PM
So look for a used encyclopedia set, they should be cheap...just don't rely on it for anything recent (politicians, political boundaries...)
Lightly used o'scopes are often cheap too. Some labs have the funding to have the latest stuff and the previous generation is sold on.
(Score: 2) by gtomorrow on Monday June 12, @06:01AM (6 children)
...that your local library is no longer accepting donated sets of encyclopedias?
In the recent past (I suffer from post-COVID-19 dischronology), I had to get rid of the family's 1970something Encyclopædia Brittanica and accompanying yearbooks. After checking with the area's various public libraries, I discovered none of them would accept such donation and that was the de facto behaviour. I eventually posted under the "Free" section on craigslist because it broke my heart to just put them curbside with the trash. "One man's trash..." and within the week, some collectors came and gave the set a good home...or maybe just sold them as paper scrap.
That said, while I still do my reading for pleasure on paper, an entire encyclopedia is a (literal) trunk of commitment and extremely hard to justify nowadays.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Monday June 12, @10:25AM (2 children)
I'm not sure what you've misspelled but it might need some reconsideration now that the symptoms list been narrowed down: https://edition.cnn.com/2023/05/25/health/long-covid-symptoms-definition/index.html [cnn.com] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2805540 [jamanetwork.com]
compiling...
(Score: 3, Funny) by gtomorrow on Monday June 12, @11:27AM (1 child)
While I truly appreciate your concern (thank you!), I'm afraid mine is an extemporaneously made-up disease. What I meant to say sans-facetiousness is that since COVID-19, which luckily I've never contracted, I can no longer say with any confidence, for example, "two years ago..." because "two years ago" was most likely actually "four or maybe five years ago". I hope I've explained myself and I'm sure that I am not the only "sufferer".
I suppose the closest **real** medical condition would be [Dyschronometria](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyschronometria).
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Monday June 12, @12:11PM
LOL I knew something was up since I see "asynchronous" a lot in CS literature and know the Greek "chronous" should have been matched with dys as in "dyssynchronous" for it to be a real word. :)
compiling...
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Monday June 12, @12:49PM (1 child)
I think that some people might be interested in these sorts of books just as part of decorating a house or as a conversation piece, but really, any encyclopedia that's more than a few years old isn't particularly useful for most things. If it's decades, then it's just collectors with a very, very specific niche as these things are rather large.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 12, @02:49PM
> part of decorating a house
Yes. We (figuratively) drew the short straw and had to clean out a hoarder house (long story). There were four encyclopedia sets in there and one of them went to a local restaurant where they had high shelves and were using books for decor. They didn't pay us anything, but at least we didn't send the books to paper recycling.
Another set included a custom made shelf unit (in excellent condition) designed exactly for the encyclopedia. A used book dealer took that, paid us a token amount. My understanding of the used book business is that very little sells, so on average they can't afford to pay much of anything.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Tuesday June 13, @03:31PM
Our library hadn't done much weeding (removal of out-dated and/or irrelevant to our mission materials) for approximately 30+ years. We also hadn't performed a full inventory in that time period. A few years ago, we started the weeding process and completed a full inventory a year or two ago. We weeded approximately 23k items from 2017 to 2021 and during that same time period we added nearly 5k items. We're definitely shrinking and we've not ordered anywhere near as many books as we had in the past. Still, at what point does someone want and out-dated self-help book? Or even worse an out-dated law book or travel book? Some things needs to be fresh or not present. Our Academic Library's mission isn't to be the be-all-end-all repository for all knowledge. (Hopefully some places like New York Public Library / Smithsonian / Internet Archive / Project Gutenberg are on that.) It's to provide our students with useful content and we do have a mission to keep historic information about or niche of the world. Especially local historic information that is relevant to our institution.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 1) by BlueCoffee on Monday June 12, @12:15PM
I had Funk & Wagnalls.
(Score: 2) by TrentDavey on Monday June 12, @08:00PM
... read All The Knowledge in the World by Simon Garfield.
https://www.simongarfield.com/books/all-the-knowledge-in-the-world/ [simongarfield.com]