a bit more on EB going on line

[David Farber <farber () central cis upenn edu>]

Jayne Levin                                           Net Week Inc.
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                 T H E   I N T E R N E T   L E T T E R


      On Corporate Users, Internetworking and Information Services
========================================================================
Vol. 1, No. 4          A Net Week Inc. Publication          Jan. 1, 1994
(c) 1994


004) Encyclopedia Britannica to Go On-line in '94


     It's 225 years old, conservative and reliable. And in 1994 the
Encyclopedia Britannica is going on-line.
    Although no formal announcement is expected until spring, current
plans call for an electronic version of the encyclopedia to be available
in the fall on a subscription basis to colleges and universities, where it
can be accessed by Internet users.
    The digital encyclopedia is going into beta testing at the University
of California at San Diego this month, said Joseph Esposito, president of
Encyclopedia Britannica of North America.
    "It's going to take a little bit of time before it's all done, which
is why we've given ourselves plenty of lead time," he said.
    The on-line version will be text only--about 44 million words--and
will not include the 23,000 illustrations found in the printed version of
the Encyclopedia Britannica (EB). The encyclopedia has been in digital
form for 20 years for the company's internal use, but the new plans mark
the first time the full reference work will be available to outsiders via
computer.
    The company has "no plans for distribution beyond the academic
community at this time," Esposito said. As for access by individual
Internet users, Esposito said, "Our research suggests that a very large
proportion of Internet users do in fact have university affiliations, so
I'm not sure if this is a major roadblock [for individuals]."
    The company is taking great care to ensure that both print and digital
versions of the encyclopedia will be available to regular customers.
    "We're making available to the people who buy print sets of
Encyclopedia Britannica coupons that allow them to buy deeply discounted
versions of any electronic EB when such a product is on the market. So
we're being very careful to protect our customers, and nobody is going to
feel that they were surprised by an electronic product," Esposito said.
    But will there always be a print version of the encyclopedia as well
as an electronic version? This, said Esposito, is "the billion dollar
question."
    "My own view is that the answer to that is yes," he said. "I'm
inclined to believe that print is going to outlive myself, and perhaps
outlive my children as well. Part of the reason is that there's simply
things we can do with the print medium that we cannot do with the digital
media. And there's also things that we can do with the digital media that
we cannot do with print. It works both ways."
    The book version, for example, "lends itself to long, discursive
articles, of which the encyclopedia has quite a few," he said. "For
looking up bits of information, the electronic version is superior. For
reading discursive essays, the print version is superior."
    Consumers, however, will dictate which medium will be available for
the encyclopedia, Esposito said.
    "It's a question of letting the medium find its own way," he said. "So
I think we're going to have the print for some time to come. Having said
that, we're not going to make that decision. We're going to let the
marketplace make that decision for us."
    The academic community, meanwhile, is eagerly awaiting the electronic
version of the encyclopedia.
    "We have been approached now by so many schools for this property, we
are just amazed," Esposito said. "And the number of schools that want to
serve as beta-test sites is astonishing...We have been amazed at the
pent-up demand for an on-line version of EB. It's obviously something
we're quite grateful to see, and we hope that we will be able to get the
product just right and that people will be satisfied with it."
    Unlike many book publishers, Encyclopedia Britannica does not plan to
license its database.
   "We've decided that we will do our own internal software development
and be, in effect, an electronic publisher," Esposito said.


                                                           --Robert Shepard