Early history of the Encyclopaedia
The evolution of the
Encyclopaedia
Britannica: from the
Macropaedia to
Britannica Online
Dorothy Auchter
The author
Dorothy Auchter is Reference Librarian at the Main Library,
Ohio State University, Ohio, USA, <auchter.3@osu.edu>
Keywords
Electronic publishing, References, Resources,
Technological change
Abstract
For over 200 years the Encyclopaedia Britannica has been the
standard against which all other English language encyclope-
dias are measured. Although universally acknowledged as an
outstanding reference work, it has endured a series of
financial crises, questionable editorial decisions, and a
difficult transition into the computer age. This article will
examine the most controversial of the Britannica’s moves, the
decision to divide the encyclopedia into the Micropaedia and
Macropaedia. The many intellectual improvements that were
introduced into the Britannica at this time were overshad-
owed by attention given to the unusual, sometimes frustrat-
ing, new arrangement of the set. An even greater threat to
the Britannica’s livelihood has come from the electronic age.
Ironically, it was only after the Britannica came online that
many of the problems that were inherent in the printed
version have been resolved.
Reference Services Review
Volume 27 · Number 3 · 1999 · pp. 291-299
© MCB University Press · ISSN 0090-7324
291
Britannica
The Encyclopaedia Britannica originated in
Edinburgh, Scotland, when engraver Andrew
Bell, printer Colin Macfarquhar and editor
William Smellie became convinced that the
English-speaking world would welcome a sub-
stantial reference work along the lines of the
French Encyclopédie which had been published
in 1751. Writing many of the shorter articles
themselves and “borrowing” articles by special-
ists such as Benjamin Franklin and John Locke,
the editors released the first edition of the Ency-
clopaedia Britannica in 100 parts between 1768
and 1771. The work sold well, and subsequent
editions were issued on a regular basis. With
each successive edition the encyclopedia
became increasingly sophisticated. Although the
editors had written a substantial portion of the
earlier editions, by the third edition it became
customary to hire specialists to write articles in
their fields. Many of the most gifted writers of
their day have contributed articles to the Britan-
nica. Sir Walter Scott wrote essays on literature,
Robert Malthus contributed an article on popu-
lation and Albert Einstein wrote on physics. By
the time the eleventh edition was released in
1911, the Britannica was hailed as the greatest
encyclopedia in the world.
Throughout the nineteenth and early twenti-
eth centuries the fortunes of the Encyclopaedia
Britannica rose and fell in response to the
vagaries of economic trends. As the Britannica
grew in size and complexity, operating costs
rose and turning a profit in uncertain economic
times became increasingly difficult. US
investors began lending assistance in the late
nineteenth century, and by 1901 complete
ownership had crossed the Atlantic to the USA.
Between 1915 and 1941 the quintessentially
British icon was owned and marketed by the
American department store Sears Roebuck.
When William Benton, a vice president of the
University of Chicago, expressed interest in
acquiring the encyclopedia, the Britannica was
transferred to Chicago where it eventually
became a private company loosely affiliated with
the University of Chicago in 1941.
With new editions being released every ten to
20 years, the company received a glut of income
after each new release, followed by a long dry
 The evolution of the Encyclopaedia Britannica
Dorothy Auchter
period with little revenue. After the 14th edition
in 1929 it was decided that the massive editorial
efforts and unpredictability of sales made peri-
odic editions unprofitable. In 1938 the company
began a system of continuous revision and
annual publication, thereby insuring not only a
steady stream of income but a reference work
that was capable of reflecting current research
and information.
Growing dissatisfaction with the
Britannica
The new process of annually updating the entire
encyclopedia solved many of Britannica’s finan-
cial difficulties and greatly improved the value of
the Britannica as a source capable of providing
updated information on important events. In
spite of these improvements, by the 1950s
problems in the Britannica became increasingly
apparent. Pressures of producing annual
updates did not allow for revision of more than a
small percentage of articles. Most editorial
effort was concentrated on incorporating cur-
rent political and social trends and scientific
discoveries, and updating the biographies of
important living individuals. The problem with
this piecemeal approach did not become evident
for several decades. Although not as readily
apparent as scientific discoveries or the death of
a famous person, scholarship on academic
topics evolve, change and augment over time.
Editors were pressured into incorporating new
and current information, at the expense of
articles on historical topics, literature and the
arts.
The result of this neglect over several decades
was that many articles on academic topics grew
stale and inaccurate. The revered Britannica
came under increasing public criticism from
scholars, librarians and lay people alike. By the
1950s a substantial portion of the articles had
yet to be updated in any of the annual revisions,
leaving some entries penned in the nineteenth
century untouched by a twentieth-century
mentality. In 1958 an editor from a Singapore
newspaper called attention to a shocking pas-
sage in the article on Malaysia which had sur-
vived 28 annual revisions:
The Malays are indolent, pleasure-loving, improv-
ident, fond of bright clothing, of comfort, of ease,
and dislike toil exceedingly. They have no value of
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money, and little notion of honesty where money
is concerned. They borrow rather than earn
money.... They are addicted to gambling, and
formerly were much given to fighting, but their
courage on the whole is not high if judged by
European standards.
Although the above passage was unusually
antiquated, it clearly demonstrated that the
encyclopedia’s articles were not being systemat-
ically reviewed for currency, accuracy and fresh
interpretations. Another problem was with the
tone of the articles that did receive frequent
updates. The basic editorial policy of the Britan-
nica had traditionally been to write for the
“intelligent layman,” but the articles written in
the first half of the twentieth century had
become increasingly complex and arcane.
Scholars appeared to be writing articles that
would stand up to scrutiny from their peers,
resulting in articles that were unfathomable to
the intelligent layperson.
In 1960 the most vocal and persistent of the
Britannica’s critics, Chicago physicist Harvey
Einbinder, published several articles spotlight-
ing the deficiencies in the encyclopedia. Ein-
binder’s criticisms eventually resulted in a book,
The Myth of the Britannica, in 1964. Among his
most damning charges were:
• The inability of the annual editions to main-
tain currency. Incremental revisions had
resulted in serious imbalances in quality and
currency. Einbinder cited a large percentage
of articles on literature and the arts that were
at least 75-years old and contained obsoles-
cent or inaccurate information.
• A Victorian prudishness which hesitated to
present clear and complete information on
topics such as homosexuality or infidelity. As
a result, biographical entries on prominent
individuals such as Oscar Wilde, Peter Ilich
Tchaikovsky and Admiral Nelson gloss over
crucial events in the lives of these individuals.
• Editorial practices which abandoned the
interests of the educated layperson in favor of
the specialist, as evidenced by scientific
articles that were unintelligible to the layper-
son and lengthy, untranslated quotations in
foreign languages.
• Outdated bibliographies which often con-
tained references that were at least 75-years
old, making them useless for assisting the
 The evolution of the Encyclopaedia Britannica
Dorothy Auchter
reader in locating supplementary scholarship
on a topic.
• A parochial attitude that treated topics from
an Anglo-American point of view, rarely
incorporating views or analysis from non-
Anglo parts of the world.
Einbinder’s salvos did not fall on deaf ears. The
editors of the Britannica were well aware of the
deficiencies and were beginning to focus on the
alphabetic arrangement of the encyclopedia as
one of the primary problems. For an encyclope-
dia with the size, scope, and depth of the Britan-
nica, the alphabetic arrangement of the entries
was leading to increasing fragmentation, repeti-
tion, and the corollary problem of inconsisten-
cies when entries were submitted by different
scholars. For example, the Battle of Gettysburg
not only needed to be addressed in its own
entry, but required substantial treatment in the
entries for the American Civil War, US History,
General Robert E. Lee, General George G.
Meade and Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. This
fragmentation of relevant information under-
mined the coherence, readability, and overall
understanding of the major issues.
An additional concern focused on the rapidly
evolving state of knowledge and scientific dis-
covery. In a typical year in the 1970s there were
over 35,000 scientific journals annually publish-
ing over a million articles. As Encyclopaedia
Britannica editor Warren E. Preece stated:
“Never before in history had knowledge been
proliferating at rates comparable to those expe-
rienced in the third quarter of the twentieth
century; never before had knowledge been
broken into so many specialized segments, each
the private responsibility of an academic disci-
pline” (Preece, 1974). The editors concluded
that alphabetically arranged entries could no
longer provide enough background, context and
explanation of increasingly complex scholarship
without an unacceptable amount of repetition
and cross-referencing.
The cumulation of these factors, in addition
to the recognition that the fourteenth edition of
the Encyclopaedia Britannica was in need of
substantial revision, led the editors to question
whether the traditional, alphabetically arranged
encyclopedic model, established in the eigh-
teenth century, was the most effective format for
their work. The “hunt and find” encyclopedia
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tended to stress factual information rather than
understanding. Concise, alphabetically
arranged entries did not have the space to pro-
vide the context and analysis necessary for true
comprehension of the topic. Information was
merely being conveyed, rather than analyzed
and interpreted. Facts reigned supreme at the
expense of knowledge.
The circle of learning
The editors of the Britannica decided to plan an
ambitious new edition of the encyclopedia
which would seek to classify the bulk of the
Britannica’s contents under a topical scheme
rather than the traditional alphabetic arrange-
ment. Believing that an encyclopedia should be
more than just a “store-house of facts” the
editors envisioned a tool which would allow a
reader to make a complete study of a given
topic. The goal was to create an entirely unique
encyclopedia that would provide both a wide
breadth of information and a synthesized
accounting of human knowledge. By grouping
articles on similar topics near one another, it
was hoped that the reader could seamlessly
explore a given subject without relying on end-
less cross-references and repetitive articles.
The overriding objective of the new set was to
provide the reader with an opportunity to
explore the “circle of learning”. The concept of
a circle of learning, articulated by Britannica’s
director of planning Mortimer Adler, states that
there is a body of essential information which
underlies human knowledge, experience and
collective memory. If this circle of learning is
laid open to the reader it will allow for
sustained, systematic self-education. Whereas
other encyclopedias broke up knowledge into
small, digestible chunks, the Britannica was
determined to pull these disparate facts together
into unified, comprehensive articles that assimi-
lated the world’s knowledge.
Initial plans for the new encyclopedia began
in 1964 with the hiring of an editorial planning
committee. Editors were selected not only for
their knowledge of specific academic disciplines,
but for their ability to envision a seamless circle
of learning, encompassing the world of knowl-
edge. The editor’s task was to somehow struc-
ture this circle of learning into a linear, text-
based format. With electronic hypertext ability
 The evolution of the Encyclopaedia Britannica
Dorothy Auchter
almost a generation away, the editors had no
choice but to graft this innovative plan onto the
traditional, linear bound volume format. Special
attention would be paid to the scope and
arrangement of the topics in an attempt to make
the linear format flow in a logical fashion.
Unfortunately, because self-education is inher-
ently a unique individual process, users would
inevitably approach topics from different angles
and a linear structure, no matter how carefully
planned, would have varying degrees of success
for different users.
The editors quickly rejected the possibility of
arranging their classification along traditional
academic disciplines, such as physics, medicine,
or theology. Interdisciplinary topics such as
“death” would need to be examined in each of
the preceding disciplines, and this was precisely
the sort of fragmentation the editors were hop-
ing to avoid. The initial outline of knowledge
was therefore constructed along interdiscipli-
nary lines into ten major categories that were
broad enough to accommodate various aspects
of specific topics:
(1)Matter and Energy (atoms, elementary
particles and the transformation of matter).
(2)The Earth (atmosphere, oceans, weather,
geologic development).
(3)Life on Earth (living organisms, behavioral
responses, reproduction).
(4)Human Life (stages of life, behavior and
experience, disease, language).
(5)Human Society (culture, social organiza-
tion, government, law, education).
(6)Art (literature, theater, architecture, paint-
ing, dance).
(7)Technology (transportation, agriculture,
military, construction).
(8)Religion (major religions of the world
throughout history).
(9)The History of Mankind (Peoples and
civilizations from all eras of history).
(10)Branches of Knowledge (Logic, mathemat-
ics, science, humanities).
These broad categories were further broken
down into 42 divisions and 159 subdivisions.
Using this outline of knowledge the editors
spent several years filling in the 4,207 entries
that would ultimately comprise the Macropae-
dia, the core volumes of the new Encyclopaedia
Britannica that were designed to provide
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in-depth insight and understanding of their
topics. The objective of the meticulous attention
to the outline of knowledge was the desire to
create a definitive reference work that would
have fewer but more lengthy entries, resulting in
similar topics being presented in the same sec-
tion. It would tell you more than Joan of Arc’s
birth date and bare outlines of her life, but
would allow you to see her place within the
context of French history and the Hundred
Years’ War without jumping to other volumes.
The outline itself was released as the Propaedia,
intended to provide the user with a guide to the
Britannica, and as a tool for the systematic study
of a topic and its related aspects of interest. It is
in the Propaedia that the reader can see the circle
of learning laid out, an admirable attempt to
organize the vast world of knowledge into a
coherent structure.
The editors were aware that their innovative
encyclopedia might prove a hard sell to librari-
ans and parents, who relied on encyclopedias to
provide fast, easy and convenient access to
specific questions. Referring to this need as the
“hunt and find” technique, the editors were
astute enough to realize that if this function
were totally removed from their encyclopedia a
huge segment of their market would likely turn
elsewhere for the purchase of their family ency-
clopedia. The revised encyclopedia would
therefore consist of a set of ready reference
volumes known as the Micropaedia. These
volumes would be alphabetically arranged and
provide short, descriptive information on specif-
ic topics. Heavy references were made within
the Micropaedia to the Macropaedia, giving it its
secondary purpose as an index to the larger set.
Thus, the birth of a tripartite encyclopedia
consisting of a Propaedia, Micropaedia and
Macropaedia.
Encyclopaedia Britannica
After ten years of planning and a $32 million
investment, the fifteenth edition of the Ency-
clopaedia Britannica, billed as Britannica 3, made
its debut in 1974. The text of the encyclopedia
had been almost completely revised with new
articles. In overhauling the encyclopedia the
editors had achieved a degree of balance and
proportion that was not apparent in earlier
editions. Contributors with outstanding
 The evolution of the Encyclopaedia Britannica
Dorothy Auchter
credentials had been recruited from around the
world, with less than half coming from the USA.
The list of contributors could be compared to a
star-studded cast, with entries coming from
Linus Pauling, Carl Sagan, Isaac Asimov, David
Ben-Gurion and Anthony Burgess. Although
Britannica 3 was undoubtedly the most compre-
hensive and scholarly encyclopedia ever to be
produced in English, the reviews concentrated
to an overwhelming extent on the innovative
structure of the set. Some of the reviews warned
librarians that they would need time for learning
how to use the set before making it available to
the public. Most reviews ranged from uncer-
tainty to disappointment:
The dismembering of the body of the Britannica
into mini- and maxi-pedias is not only devoid of
benefits, it has also given us the spectacle of a ten
volume index for a nineteen volume work.... It is
sad that the editors of Britannica 3 were not con-
tent with solid excellence, and went wantoning
after the strange god of innovation for its own sake
(McCracken, 1976).
I was least anxious regarding the merits of the
ready-reference, an illustrated index of 102,000
entries... called the Micropaedia for “little knowl-
edge,” and little knowledge is what it provides. It
has proved to be grotesquely insufficient as an
index, radically constricting the utility of the
Macropaedia, which has come to surpass my
expectation of it (Wolff, 1976).
Whether all this will work in practice as expected
is a question. I have inspected part six of Propae-
dia, “The World of Art” by Mark Van Doren….
Complex, difficult, perhaps even obscure, but
certainly interesting and challenging to the gen-
uine seeker after information and ideas. Whether
the look-it-upper, read-as-he-runs seeker will feel
the same remains to be seen (Grumbach, 1974).
The fifteenth edition of Encyclopedia Britannica
will be found, by at least some readers, to be
somewhat difficult to use and by most, hard to get
accustomed to, but it is an authoritative, compre-
hensive, contemporary reference work for the
intelligent reader, and it is worthy of the long
Britannica tradition (Booklist, 1975).
It should be purchased by libraries for its detailed
coverage of the contemporary world, but will not
entirely replace any printing of the Britannica
published since 1970 (Cole, 1974).
Many of the early reviewers of Britannica 3 were
simply bewildered by the new structure. A
handful of scholars appreciated the tripartite
structure as an innovative attempt to have a
reference work function as a resource for both
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specific and broad level inquiries, but these
people were in the minority. Although there was
clearly value in the new structure, there were a
few areas in which Britannica 3 fell short of its
objective. In spite of the enormous intellectual
effort of compiling the Propaedia, the editors
were ultimately unwilling to see their topical
arrangement of the Macropaedia through to
completion, and arranged the 4,207 entries
alphabetically.
This decision was likely based on the added
complexity that a purely topical arrangement
would have created for a user. Because the
articles are on broad topics and are often quite
lengthy, the need for constant cross-referencing
was vastly diminished, but it was still a long way
from the truly topical arrangement initially
envisioned in the Propaedia. For the editors to
shy away from arranging the Macropaedia in
accordance with the outline set forth in the
Propaedia was a failure to wholeheartedly com-
mit to the concept of a “seamless circle of learn-
ing”. The alphabetical arrangement of articles
seriously undermines the ability to easily browse
among topics of related interest. Because the
headings of the Macropaedia are not intuitive
enough to give immediate accessibility, the
capitulation to the alphabetical arrangement is
difficult to justify.
Britannica’s old nemesis, Harvey Einbinder,
took almost a year before issuing commentary of
the new version of the classic encyclopedia, but
when he did he censured the encyclopedia from
a whole new angle. One of the changes in editor-
ial policy for Britannica 3 was the commitment
to include scholars from around the world, thus
avoiding highly partisan and inaccurate infor-
mation on foreign countries that had marred
earlier editions of the work. By inviting native
scholars to contribute articles on the history,
culture and current affairs of their nations, it
was hoped that the Britannica could provide
fresh and accurate information that was not
readily available in other reference works. Ein-
binder zeroed in on the problems that resulted
from this editorial decision (Einbinder, 1975).
Writers who lived under authoritarian regimes
were not likely to submit articles that presented
the accurate, non-partisan analysis sought by
the editors of the Britannica. Einbinder called
attention to articles describing rosy life in
Moscow with its successful communist
 The evolution of the Encyclopaedia Britannica
Dorothy Auchter
economic plans, an article on Spanish govern-
ment that does not discuss Francisco Franco’s
role in their government, and an article on
South Africa that never mentions the word
“apartheid”. It was later learned that many of
the articles on the Soviet Republics were sup-
plied by Novosti, the official Soviet press
agency. Subsequent versions of the Britannica
modified the blatant travelogue air that pervad-
ed entries on the Soviet and other authoritarian
regimes.
One problem that had driven the editors of
the Britannica to embark on their new structure
was the concern with the vast amount of repeti-
tion that was necessitated by the traditional
encyclopedic structure. Contributors of articles
to the Macropaedia of Britannica 3 were given a
small section of the Propaedia for which they
were to be responsible. They were instructed
not to deviate or repeat information that was to
be primarily addressed in other sections.
Although this successfully removed the prob-
lems of repetition among articles contributed by
different scholars, it had an unfortunate effect
on the readability of the articles, which were
intended to be read by intelligent laypeople. In
an effort to avoid repetition, difficult concepts
are not explained within the text, but are noted
with a cross-reference. Thus the article on
semiconductor devices assumes that the reader
has an understanding of thermoelectric engi-
neering, resulting in a likely need for cross-
referencing. Because of the decision to arrange
the Macropaedia alphabetically rather than
topically, such cross-references almost always
required consulting another volume.
In spite of the skepticism and frustration that
surrounded the new structure, the Encyclopaedia
Britannica was still universally regarded as the
premier general encyclopedia in the English
language. The set continued to be an automatic
purchase for librarians, who recognized that the
superior content outweighed the frustrations
created by the complicated structure. The
prominent placement of encyclopedias in
libraries is crucial to the livelihood of an ency-
clopedia. It is here where many people become
acquainted with encyclopedias and make deci-
sions about which set to purchase for their
homes. Libraries typically account for less than
5 percent of encyclopedia sales and a title must
appeal to the general public if it is to succeed
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(Book Industry Survey Group, 1994). It is
perhaps not coincidental that sales of competing
encyclopedia titles gained strength during the
1970s, perhaps in response to the perceived
difficulty of using the Britannica.
After ten years of criticism leveled at Britan-
nica 3, and the indexing in particular, the edi-
tors abandoned the idea of using the Micropae-
dia as an index to the Macropaedia. In 1985 a
two-volume index with approximately 500,000
entries was released. The Micropaedia was
expanded, and most of the articles in the
Macropaedia were either moved to the Micropae-
dia or consolidated with other articles. The
index was greeted with a sigh of relief by librari-
ans who had found the original version of Bri-
tannica 3 to be too difficult for the ordinary
patron to use. Within a year sales of this new
version of Britannica jumped 8.7 percent
(Storch, 1985).
There were critics who thought the Britanni-
ca’s concessions were not adequate and would
have preferred a return to the single, unified
arrangement. The editors were not willing to
address concerns with the tripartite structure of
the encyclopedia. They had invested $32 mil-
lion dollars into Britannica 3, the largest amount
of money ever spent on a privately published
work, and disassembling its structure based on
some negative reviews was unthinkable. Such a
drastic step would only be driven by pressure
from the market, and this was unlikely to occur.
Sales of the Encyclopedia Britannica doubled
during the 1980s and, with no competing ency-
clopedia of a similar scholarly nature on the
horizon, the future looked bright for the Ency-
clopedia Britannica. No one in the Chicago
headquarters was aware that the biggest threat
to ever face the Britannica would not be a com-
peting encyclopedia, bad reviews, or economic
downturns, but would come in the form of a
tiny electronic chip.
Electronic age
Encyclopedias were among the first printed
resources to take advantage of the electronic
age. Expensive and physically cumbersome,
they were ideal candidates to be transferred to a
CD-ROM. The compact nature and relative
affordability of electronic encyclopedias posed a
serious threat to printed versions. In 1990 a
 The evolution of the Encyclopaedia Britannica
Dorothy Auchter
complete set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica
retailed for $2,200 and consumed four and a
half feet of shelf space. For roughly the same
price as the Britannica a family could purchase a
home computer, which often came bundled
with a CD-ROM version of an encyclopedia. At
a time when many families considered the
purchase of a home computer a necessary edu-
cational purchase for their children, opting for
the comparably priced Britannica began to seem
a hopelessly old-fashioned alternative. Sales of
the Britannica plummeted from 117,000 sets in
1990 to 51,000 in 1994 (Morse, 1995). By
1996 Britannica had watched its US sales dwin-
dle to only 17 percent of their 1990 level (Media
Intelligence Bulletin, 1997).
The reluctance of the Encyclopaedia Britanni-
ca, Inc. to embrace technology resided at the
top of the corporate structure. In 1985 Britanni-
ca’s director of public relations Robert Grinnell
was quoted as saying, “The Encyclopaedia Bri-
tannica has no plans to be on a home computer.
And since the market is so small, only 4 or 5
percent of households have home computers,
we would not want to hurt our traditional way of
selling” (Tarzan, 1985). The “traditional way of
selling” was undoubtably a reference to Britan-
nica’s cadre of trained sales personnel. As the
people who were responsible for selling the vast
majority of the encyclopedias through home
sales, the 2,000 strong sales force held a surpris-
ing amount of influence on the corporate cul-
ture at Britannica’s Chicago headquarters.
These seasoned representatives earned a com-
mission of $300 per sale, and were fiercely
resistant to an electronic version which would
retail for a fraction of the price of the bound
volumes (Melcher, 1997).
Speculation for Britannica’s slow entry into
the electronic age has also focused on the ill-
advised sale of the company’s Compton unit in
1993. Compton’s had served as a lower-level
encyclopedia set to round out Britannica’s
product line. In the late 1980s the company
began to explore the possibilities of electronic
text, and launched this venture with the smaller,
less complex Comptons. When Compton’s CD-
ROM encyclopedia debuted in 1989 it was an
immediate hit. Another lower-level encyclope-
dia, Grolier’s, made its electronic debut in the
early 1990s, and the success of these electronic
encyclopedias dealt a body-blow to Britannica’s
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sales. Strapped for cash, Britannica made the
questionable decision to sell Compton’s to the
Chicago Tribune for $57 million. The company
further blundered when it apparently promised
the Tribune not to publish an electronic version
of the Encyclopaedia Britannica for two years
(Samuels, 1994). It appeared as though Britan-
nica had willingly ceded the electronic market to
these smaller, less sophisticated encyclopedias.
The visionaries of the 1960s were long gone.
The Macropaedia was a valiant but only partially
successful attempt to create a circle of learning.
The realization of the plan had been hampered
by the strictures of the linear format, the only
format available at that time. When hypertext
capabilities became a viable option, the ability
to create a true circle of learning was finally a
possibility. The editors of Britannica 3 had taken
a $34 million gamble in their commitment to
the principle of seamless, self-directed educa-
tion. The leadership of the 1980s lacked the
ambition to make a similarly bold move into the
electronic age. Rigid corporate concerns, rather
than idealistic visions, were driving the Britanni-
ca.
The first CD-ROM version of the Ency-
clopaedia Britannica was finally produced in
1994. Priced at $1,200, it was four times more
expensive than its major competitor, Microsoft’s
Encarta. In the same year the Britannica also
offered an online version of their encyclopedia
to subscribers. Again, the cost was high at $150
a year. If judged strictly by textual content, the
Britannica was clearly the intellectual superior
to all its competitors. Yet electronic technology
brought new challenges, and while other elec-
tronic encyclopedias loaded numerous sound
bites, animated clips and multimedia features,
Britannica was berated for its paucity of these
whistles and bells. In an era when no-cost or
low-cost electronic CD-ROMs were widely
available, convincing the consumer to pay over a
thousand dollars for the Britannica continued to
be a tough sell. After dropping the price of the
Britannica CD-ROM to $125 in 1997, con-
sumers at last began to show a real interest in
the product. By 1998 Britannica held a 25
percent share of the market for CD-ROM ency-
clopedia sales, holding its own against the far
less expensive competition.
 The evolution of the Encyclopaedia Britannica
Dorothy Auchter
Encyclopaedia Britannica Online
It is likely that the future of electronic encyclo-
pedias will be decided on the Internet rather
than a CD-ROM drive. Most industry
observers say that CD-ROMs are an interim
technology, and, as soon as home computers are
able to receive data quickly through cable or
improved telephone modems, online reference
sources will prove to be the medium of choice.
Unlike their sluggish debut on CD-ROM, in the
online arena Britannica has displayed a surpris-
ing amount of innovation. They were the first to
make an online encyclopedia widely available.
They are also imbedding hot links at the end of
a number of online articles to carefully selected
Web sites that the editors of the Britannica
believe can provide additional relevant informa-
tion. An Internet guide called eBLAST
(http://www.eBLAST.com) has been compiled
by Britannica’s editors. This free site offers a
searchable database of 65,000 sites screened for
content and presentation. Britannica has hopes
that the site will be a welcome alternative for
people who have exhausted themselves wading
through the floods of unfiltered and insubstan-
tial sites that overwhelm traditional search
engines. The site naturally has convenient links
to the online Encyclopaedia Britannica, where
free trial periods are readily available. It is no
doubt hoped that once people become accus-
tomed to turning to the Internet for information
they may be lured into subscribing to the online
service.
Perhaps one of the biggest challenges for
online delivery of information is the concept of
subscribing to a pay-service. There are endless
streams of free information available online, but
most consumers are not educated about the
unreliable nature of many sites, the lack of
organization and the uneven coverage of the
disciplines. Although the Internet is a good
source for certain types of popular culture and
hot button issues, obtaining definitive informa-
tion on such topics as principles of the lymphat-
ic system, the nature of magnetism, or the dif-
ferent theories of library organization is simply
not available.
With the exception of Internet service
providers such as America Online, home con-
sumers have not yet become accustomed to
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Volume 27 · Number 3 · 1999 · 291–299
subscribing to online information sources. As of
1997 there were only 12,000 subscribers to
Britannica Online, generating less than one
million dollars a year (Media Intelligence Bulletin,
1997). However, at this early stage of develop-
ment institutional subscriptions are perhaps
more important to the long-term survival of the
product. The first exposure many people have
to electronic encyclopedias will be through
using the service at their public or school library.
In this arena, the Britannica has been a clear
winner. Site licenses for Britannica Online with
schools, universities and library systems have
skyrocketed, and as of 1997 47 percent of col-
lege students in the USA have access to Britan-
nica’s online service (Reid, 1997). As students
become accustomed to the convenience and
advantages of the online product, this exposure
to Britannica Online may prove to be a powerful
selling point.
The future of the Encyclopaedia Britannica
The advent of electronic versions of the Ency-
clopaedia Britannica has solved some of the
problems that were inherent in Britannica 3.
One of the major irritations of the printed Bri-
tannica was the uncertainty over which set to
consult. Will “irrigation” warrant an entry in
the Macropaedia or will one need to make do
with a short article in the Micropaedia? Basic
questions such as these almost always require
the user to consult the index first, a step which
can safely be omitted with traditional encyclo-
pedias. Because all 44 million words from the
bound volumes are included in the electronic
versions of Britannica, the user is searching the
entire set. When entering a topic such as “conti-
nental drift” that is covered in both Micro and
Macropaedias, the brief article always appears
first, followed by links to more comprehensive
entries. Tables of contents for lengthy articles
are provided, and hypertext links make brows-
ing among related articles effortless.
The electronic age will open many new possi-
bilities to the world of encyclopedia publishing.
We have already seen the introduction of multi-
media features and hypertext ability. A less
visible but perhaps more significant change
will relate to the internal economic structure of
the encyclopedia companies. As Encyclopaedia
 The evolution of the Encyclopaedia Britannica
Dorothy Auchter
Britannica president Joseph Esposito observed
in a speech before the Smithsonian Institute, the
primary cost of producing encyclopedias has
always been in distribution. Product develop-
ment and the cost of manufacturing each
account for around 15 percent of the retail
price, leaving distribution costs to consume a
staggering 60 percent of revenue (Esposito,
1993). As distribution costs in the electronic age
will be a fraction of what they had previously
been, it is conceivable that publishers will have a
great deal more surplus revenue. How this cost
saving will be allocated remains to be seen.
While price wars will no doubt drive costs down
for the consumer, the potential for longer, more
detailed and more frequently updated articles
must be considered.
The Encyclopaedia Britannica’s entry into the
electronic world raises some interesting ques-
tions about the structure of their product. The
1974 debut of the Micro and Macropaedia was
an idealistic attempt to create a true circle of
learning, in which the curious knowledge seeker
could become absorbed in the detailed study of
a topic without the constant need for cross-
referencing demanded by traditional encyclope-
dias. Critics grumbled about the difficulty of
use, inadequate indexing and bulky nature of
the printed version of the Britannica. The debut
of the electronic version has effectively rendered
these concerns null and void. It now remains to
be seen if the printed version of the Encyclopae-
dia Britannica can survive in light of competition
from its electronic counterpart.
299
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