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

[steer.livejournal.com]

*grin* I am glad that Nature responded robustly, the Britannica rebuttal was, frankly, so much snivelling. Many of the "corrections" they point out would also work for the criticisms of Wikipedia. The only people who will believe them have made up their mind already. I took the time to go through their rebuttal piece by piece -- it was not impressive apart from the claim that Nature used pieces stitched together with material written by Nature staff (which Nature since denied)

[steer.livejournal.com]

By the way, have you seen this? Lovely (but huge) vid of how wikipedia articles evolve.

http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/gems/umlaut.html

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

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

[ihcoyc.livejournal.com]

Interesting. I'm curious about how the DVD-ROM Britannica is organised. The paper Britannica became a lot less useful once they divided it into essentially The Book of Full Articles and The Book of Stubs, although they themselves gave them pretentious Greek names that I forget completely. This arrangement thwarts browsing, which was one of the chief pleasures of a good print encyclopedia.

I use a 1957 Britannica and a 1962 Americana, myself. The Britannica is stronger on natural sciences, the Americana on biography. Both are fully alphabetical.

[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 ;-)

[reddragdiva]

I wonder if the DVD has a random page function.

Just chatted to rickybuchanan on the phone. As she put it, "What use is Britannica? It doesn't even have an article on Goatse!"

[ewx.livejournal.com]

I had a CD version of the Britannica a few years ago (indeed I still have the media but it's not installed on any currently active system; it might work under XP, on the rare days that I reboot my PC into that OS). I didn't like the interface much, but I've seen worse, and the content was indeed first-rate.

I tried to use it under WINE but it never quite worked properly. I never managed to unpick their file format for easy reading under proper operating systems (the text is encoded HTML, probably just compressed but possibly encrypted; the images are just GIFs and JPEGs).

If I bought it now I'd just use it on my Mac.

[dan-lane.livejournal.com]

1. Read my mail (sent to your gmail address).

2. Are you looking for a contract atm? a friend is desperately seeking Perl/PHP/Oracle contractors and they needed them yesterday and ISTR you knowing oracle (could be mistaken!)

[reddragdiva]

Answered email. I am not a DBA or SQL programmer, I've been sysadmin to the DBA lots and lots ...

[sbp.livejournal.com]

"Please Note: Price discounts on this item are not valid on shipments outside of the United States and Canada"

[sbp.livejournal.com]

60 quid in the UK - get it delivered to a friend in the US....

[dan-lane.livejournal.com]

1. Thanks. I'll follow it up in a few days if I don't hear anything back.

2. Fair enough, I think this is more of a development role than a sysadmin one (otherwise I'd have considered it myself).

[the_axel]

I'd be happy to help.

[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.