Or will they tear out the pages of the book to light a fire?

[reddragdiva]

I have been book-pr0ning it up big time. Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. has been slagging off Wikipedia in its usual fashion, just because their business has been in the red for fifteen years and we're ridiculously more popular, demolishing all competitors for actual readership — see EBI's response (PDF) to the study in Nature, and Nature's rebuttal (PDF). But, though the company is acting like cornered mink on PCP, their book remains the finest encyclopedia in the English language, one of the most significant non-fiction works of Anglophone culture and the mark of quality the English Wikipedians aspire to.

So I had a look through their website. HOLY SHIT, THE COMPLETE BRITANNICA ON DVD IS US$25! And I so want one of these and one of these. And I just compiled an order for £130 from the US store, though I haven't sent it yet. Oh my goodness. (And if you really want the huge printed thing, even if it's only got half the content of the DVD, that's two-thirds price too.)

I've also advised the Wikipedians of this, because we wouldn't be doing this if we weren't fans. And I want to picture EBI's faces when people buy their DVD saying they heard about it from Wikipedia.

Update: Some of the discounts only apply in the US and Canada. Watch carefully.

Comments

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

Is that DVD definitely a superset of what you get from the paper edition?

[reddragdiva]

From the descriptions on the website, it appears to shovel in as much of their stuff as they can fit on a DVD. It claims 120,000 articles, whereas the 30-volume book claims 60,000.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

Let me know if you get it working under VMWare. And whether you can copy the DVD to your Linux hard drive and virtually mount it...

[reddragdiva]

There's this unsupported-support page for Linux for the 2004 DVD, which was apparently written in Java. So if the 2006 DVD is written in Java, it should be possible to get it running. Failing that, I will just put it in VMware or run it on the Mac ;-)

[grumpy-sysadmin.livejournal.com]

I guess I'm not sure why strings(1) wouldn't solve this. I mean, GNU got all silly and taught GNU strings about charsets other than 7-bit ASCII a long time ago, right?

On the other hand, they could have been completely idiotic and made all the information images, in which case I can't imagine their digital type-setting budget.