After more than 230 years as a distinguished print work and four or five shaky ones as a CD-ROM and online subscription service, the Encyclopaedia Britannica last week launched a free online reference service with access to the full text of the more than 72,000 articles in its venerated text.
The Encyclopaedia Britannica company is offering its 32-volume encyclopedia as a portal site (www.britannica.com), supported by advertising and e-commerce, with a searchable database that includes EB content, Books in Print, news feeds from around the world, the full text of 70 popular magazines and financial reports. It didn't take long for the company to receive a validation of sorts for its new online strategy. The rush to log on to the new site was so overwhelming that EB's servers crashed, leaving the new site offline for more than two days. As PW went to press, the site remained down.
Tom Panelas, a spokesperson for EB, told PW, "We expected traffic to ramp up slowly, but traffic has been huge, international and sustained 24 hours; it never subsides." Panelas said the company was tripling its server capacity. Panelas also declined to describe the site as a "portal," noting that it "is not a doorway to other sites." Nevertheless, like many portal sites, it is organized around a powerful search engine and offers a variety of free and paid services, such as e-mail, in addition to e-commerce opportunities.
Panelas emphasized that the site is not just for kids' homework; he expects EB to be an information provider for a highly educated market. The site's search engine will produce "integrated" results listing not only EB articles but related Web sites, magazine articles and, of course, books--which can then be purchased by clicking through to EB's retail partner, Barnesandnoble.com. Banner advertising will be linked to searches and there will also be sponsored content and subject categories for books and other products, said Panelas, "where you can also buy stuff that's tasteful and consistent with the content clusters."
Panelas also noted that EB has launched Britannica.com as a separate business unit that will include the Web site, CD-ROM and DVD products and site licenses. Encyclopaedia Britannica will also continue to produce the $1250 book set, including a new 40-volume print edition of the encyclopedia. And while it moves forward with its free site, EB.com will continue to sell site licenses (available at www.eb.com, which did not crash) for value-added EB content without advertising to colleges and school and public libraries. According to Panelas, EB.com is licensed by every large U.S. university.
EB's embrace of the Web's counter-intuitive economic golden rule--give content away in order to sell more of it--has been late and came only after the sales of its 32-volume book sets declined dramatically in the face of competition from often inferior but cheaper and more convenient multimedia CD-ROM reference works.
