V




VALEDICTORY


In 1994 Kenneth F. Kister, a reference book enthusiast in Tampa, Florida, published the second edition of Kister’s Best Encyclopedias. It was, almost inevitably, a 500-page single-volume encyclopaedia itself, and covered the big general encyclopaedias alongside medium-sized encyclopaedias and small encyclopaedias, as well as children’s encyclopaedias and specialist encyclopaedias on the decorative arts, engineering and childcare. There was even a small section on the leading encyclopaedias in China, Japan, Korea, Spain and Russia. (In Russia there was only one, Bol’shavia Sovetskaia Entsiklopediia, or Great Soviet Encyclopaedia, not entirely the work of the Central Committee, but certainly a publication with a Marxist–Leninist bias, with, for example, the American Declaration of Independence derided as the product of a disastrous bourgeois revolution.)

Among Japanese sets, Kenneth F. Kister singles out the ‘serviceable’ single-volume Daijiten Desuku (Tokyo, 1983) and the ‘well-edited, handsomely illustrated’ twenty-three-volume Dai-Nixon Hakka Jitendra (Tokyo, 1973). Among Korean-language volumes, Kister notes that when a translated Britannica appeared with added Korean-interest articles in 1992, its publishers in Seoul had an optimistic message. They had taken ‘great pains to cover North Korean topics in a realistic manner. In this way the editors have made their own contribution to realising a unified Korea.’ Nothing if not ambitious.

Kister’s exhaustive survey was timely in a way he couldn’t have known when he began. The mid-1990s marked a long slow funeral for the print encyclopaedias that occupied nine-tenths of his report. The CD-ROM was taking over, and not long after that most people would have some sort of dial-up online service provider, and his guide swiftly came to resemble the passenger list on the Titanic.*

But what a list, and what a story was winding down. He mentions many briefly popular volumes from the 1950s and ’60s, the heyday of small-scale editions produced by established publishing houses eager for a slice. The Macmillan Family Encyclopedia, Webster’s Family Encyclopedia, Barnes & Noble Encyclopedia, Random House Encyclopedia, many of them with student or children’s versions.

Kister’s tone is as generous as his analysis is bland. ‘Information in Funk & Wagnalls is normally reliable and presented in an impartial manner,’ he declares. The Grolier Encyclopedia of Knowledge, a slightly reduced version of the standard Grolier Academic American produced primarily for sale in supermarkets, was praised for its ‘broad and carefully balanced coverage, accurate and impartial presentation of material, sound organization and effective access to specific topics and facts, first-rate illustrations, impeccable authority’. In other words, like the vast majority of publications under consideration, it was a good encyclopaedia, or, at the very worst, good for its intended market.

What made Kister’s interesting were his comparison tables, in which he rated one publication next to another in terms of number of words, pages and illustrations, and then cross-references, index entries and price. Each encyclopaedia was then assigned a grade, with A being ‘excellent’ and D ‘below average’. In the fourteen medium-sized adult encyclopaedias under consideration, eleven were either A or B, with one C and two Ds. Prospective purchasers were encouraged not to base their judgement purely on the grades, ‘which are necessarily arbitrary’.

Equally arbitrary were the ‘report cards’ he assigned according to the treatment of various topics. For the medium-sized publications he took a list of ten subjects, including Computers, Halloween, Magic Johnson, Measles, Nuclear Energy and Sex Education, and gave each a grade for Coverage, Accuracy, Clarity and ‘Recency’. In Compton’s, almost every topic got an A in every category, although Computers and Nuclear Energy only got a C for Clarity. For the large adult comparison between Britannica, Americana and Collier’s, Kister reshuffled his subject list, now selecting topics including Philip Glass and the Shroud of Turin. The best overall performance was judged to be Collier’s with As across the board, followed by Americana with only a little slippage when it came to Galileo, and lastly there was Britannica, which let itself down with poor Recency when it came to both Circumcision and Heart Disease.

Who was Mr Kister to conduct such a guide? He billed himself as ‘North America’s best known reviewer of information materials’, although this in itself must have been hard to quantify. As well as encyclopaedias, he had written comprehensive guides to atlases and dictionaries, and he held a master’s in library science from the Simmons College Graduate School of Library and Information Science in Boston.

Kister was also the new Laurance Hart. Beginning in 1929, and for the next thirty-five years, Hart had published his ‘Comparison of Encyclopedias’, known universally as The Hart Chart. This was a sheet measuring 17 by 11 inches sent every six months from his home in New Jersey at a cost of 35 cents for the first sheet and then 15 cents thereafter. Each sheet contained eleven tables, some of them primitive in their appraisal: he measured both ‘price per 100 pages’ and ‘price per million words’, thus penalising elegant typography and good editing. His obituaries in at least two library journals praised the role his work played in raising standards in reference works and simplifying the work of acquisition.

A few years later, librarians would be faced with other, less familiar, choices. In June 1998, at the Annual Conference of the American Library Association in Washington DC, one of the topics concerned the future of digital encyclopaedias. Specifically, members were concerned with how confusing this new world could be, and how fast this landscape was changing. They wanted to know where to invest their energies and budget.

James Rettig, a librarian at the University of Richmond, Virginia, presented a conference paper marking this radical transformation over the last fifteen years. It started, he said, with the ‘simple porting over of imageless ASCII text to pre-Web online systems’, but then things got complicated.

Then we had text-only CD-ROM encyclopedias, followed by text and-still-image encyclopedias, followed by text-still-image sound-and-video CD-ROM encyclopedias, followed by text-still image-sound-and-video CD-ROM encyclopedias including simulations and animations, followed by text-still image-sound-and-video CD-ROM encyclopedias including simulations and animations and links to Web sites, followed, of course, by online interactive encyclopedias combining all of the above.

The field now resembled a forest of wires at the back of an early computer. Amid the confusion, mistakes could be costly: early CD-ROMs cost hundreds of dollars. Library users would all want the latest and most exciting versions, but when would the technology reach its zenith? The answer, of course was ‘never’, but at some stage a decision had to be made. The confusion and mistakes could, of course, prove costlier still to the encyclopaedia makers themselves.

In June 1983, the big digital questions descended upon the offices of Encyclopaedia Britannica. The sales promotion department met to consider precisely how much of a threat to its business was the computer. A memo documenting the main discussion points of that meeting was issued to its sales teams (as ammunition against potential customers wanting a digital version), and years later it was published on the website of Robert McHenry, for several years Britannica’s editor-in-chief.

‘One of the questions we are most frequently asked, by both our own people and outsiders, is “When will Britannica be available on a computer?”,’ the memo began. ‘The answer we give is, “Not for a long time”.’

The memo then outlines several reasons for this decision.

None of the popular models of home computer had enough memory to store Britannica. The company calculated how many floppy disks would be required just to store the index, and it came to a vague figure of 100–200.

The option of putting the encyclopaedia on a large mainframe computer and allowing a user to access it via their home computer and a telephone was deemed unwieldy and expensive. It was difficult to find your way around and it was easy to lose your place. On a screen one could read only a few words at a time. ‘A book is a lot easier to use and is more cost effective at this time.’

A computer makes searching fast, but it is not an intelligent way of negotiating an encyclopaedia. The memo gave the example of ‘orange’, which would offer the possibilities of the fruit, the colour, Orange County, or William of Orange. In the print version Britannica indexers had already done that sifting for the reader, eliminating trivial or random references.

‘Until new ways are developed,’ the memo concluded, ‘we can provide a better, easier-to-use encyclopaedia in printed form than in any computerized version. We will not change our delivery method from the printed page to the electronic form until we are sure that it is the most efficient way for our readers to receive it.’

Within a decade, Britannica would be all but overrun by the forward-thinking, distinctly glamorous, multimedia and easily searchable CD-ROMs marketed by Compton’s, Grolier and Microsoft. Tradition – even one stretching back to the eighteenth century – would be afforded little respect as it crashed head-on into a digital future.



VANQUISHED!


If the sport was boxing, the pre-match betting would have evened out nicely. In one corner stood the behemoth, a champion of such towering intellectual prowess and competitive experience that it was surely able to outsmart anyone. And in the other stood the sprightly upstart with fanciful ideas backed by new money. In late 1985, with Britannica’s sales flourishing and Microsoft Windows still at its launch pad, only the foolhardy or visionary would feel secure about the outcome. But then the rules seemed to change mid-fight, and the sport was suddenly being marketed to a new and younger audience watching it on reflective screens, and all the hard-won expertise acquired in the traditional training camp seemed suddenly irrelevant. Rather than fight to the end, as it had done in all its other contests, the hardened behemoth collapsed, tragic in its shocking fall.

A tortuous analogy, admittedly, and quite lacking the redemptive Hollywood ending (it wasn’t Rocky). But it could all have turned out rather differently. In the mid-1980s, a fledgling Microsoft had tried to entice Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc. into a digital partnership. The software company knew that a CD-ROM encyclopaedia would encourage people to adopt its Windows operating system, and it tried to persuade Britannica that a partnership would keep it relevant in the twenty-first century – a searchable database of the world’s knowledge available on home computers at a fraction of the cost of the original, with minimal delivery complications and no shelving issues. Britannica said no, partly out of pride, one imagines, and certainly because it feared a diminution of profits. The deal seemed far too one-sided in Microsoft’s favour. Only with hindsight, as the project Microsoft had codenamed ‘Gandalf’ turned into Encarta, does this seem like a calamitous decision.

In 2016, Shane Greenstein, a professor at the Technology Operations and Management Unit at Harvard Business School, published a paper called ‘The Reference Wars’, a forensic account of Britannica’s failure to embrace digital technology. It was really a story of the decline of all standard encyclopaedias, and the old-model notions of how an encyclopaedia should be bought and read. There was an obvious moral too. This was a story of how the personal computer ‘could visit major trauma’ on an old institution, and how no enterprise could afford to consider itself too revered or intellectually superior to take on the challenge.*

Professor Greenstein suggests that Britannica executives were thoroughly aware of the threats of new technology to their business, but were too tied into the old model – the old sales methods, the reliable profits from book sales that had sustained the company for 220 years – to even want to move fast enough in the digital world. ‘In Britannica’s case … even the best outcome in the new market would have been a decline in sales and profitability,’ he notes. ‘As executives begin to manage this uncomfortable situation, the situation goes from bad to worse in the old market. The demand for the old falls at almost the same time that Britannica fails to succeed in the new.’ It was like an addict helplessly acting against their own best interests. ‘When no rational manager could maintain an illusion about the prospects for growth in the old market, management still chose to not favour the new market.’

It was all the more perplexing because Britannica, Inc. had an early toehold in this new world. It had owned Compton’s Encyclopaedia since 1961, and had launched Compton’s MultiMedia Encyclopedia in 1989, the first such product on the market.

The Compton’s operating manual reminds us just how unfamiliar the system must have appeared. ‘To scroll through an article select Play using button 1. Pushing button 1 several times allows you to scroll faster. To page through an article select Play using button 2. Some short articles may be complete in themselves, but in most cases the article will contain one or more cross-references to major articles in Compton’s. These are indicated by Jump icons. To go to a reference select the Jump Arrow.’

But there were also imaginative attempts to make the information (30,000 short articles) enticing. Icons indicated sound and video clips, and links to maps. For some entries, Star Trek’s Patrick Stewart guided users through a Time Machine, a tour through specific historical periods and major events: ‘First, select Enter Machine then select Past (Rewind). Eras are indicated by drawings in the window, with dates above the window. To go toward the future select Future (Play).’

If operating it was clunky, selling it was half-hearted. The Compton’s CD-ROM came bundled ‘for free’ to anyone who bought a full print set of Britannica (at between $1500–$2000), but it was vastly overpriced at $895 when bought on its own. At the beginning of the 1990s, Britannica’s 2000-strong sales force still sold most of their sets through solicited house calls. They had no idea how to use a compact disc, let alone market one. Shane Greenstein quotes a Britannica employee who recalls, ‘I conducted over a year of training with the sales force and taught them step by step how to use the demo on it; they didn’t know how to operate the computers in the potential buyers’ homes.’*

Four years later, having fumbled its early chance to dominate the market, Britannica, Inc. sold its interest in Compton’s to the Chicago-based Tribune media group. By the time Britannica tried again, and released its own expensive and unexciting Britannica CD-ROM in 1994, it had already lost out to Microsoft’s much cheaper all-bells-and-whistles Encarta by a year. And it was no consolation for the Britannica executives to tell themselves that Encarta was an inferior product. In fact, it was only inferior when judged by the reverentially high standards of print; judged by the clickable criteria of the new world, it would change the game.

Encyclopaedias behind them, the future ahead: Bill and Melinda Gates like what they see

The development of Encarta wasn’t smooth, but its main champion – Bill Gates himself – was persistent. After Britannica had rejected its overtures, Microsoft pursued its encyclopaedic content one rung down, to the popular and successful World Book. But World Book also turned down a Microsoft partnership, as did Collier’s. Like Britannica, the publishers feared a big dent in print sales, and World Book was hatching plans to launch its own disc version in 1990. Microsoft’s frustration increased when it learnt that Grolier would soon be partnering with Apple, making its content more easily accessible with a point-and-click mouse than it was in the PC MS-DOS version.*

In 1989, Gates finally found a match in Funk & Wagnalls, the company that reasoned that if it wanted to sell its low-budget encyclopaedias to a mass market, the best place to do that might be in supermarkets.*

Once a licensing deal was agreed, Microsoft set about enhancing the text for its digital offering. The Grolier had been criticised for including only grainy images in its disc, and so Microsoft employed the great media buzzword of the time – synergy – to use its recently created Corbis photo and video library to bring Encarta alive. Faced with storage limitations (at a time before MP3s and efficient image compression), Encarta editors added clips that would grab most attention at its presentations – the Apollo moon shots, a recording of Einstein, spuming whales. It also included more entries on popular culture and business affairs, and it reflected as many recent events as it could. Meanwhile, in the world of ink and tree-felling, Britannica kept on pushing its exhaustive and leaden yearbooks.

The initial launch of Encarta towards the end of 1992 was not a success. Its marketing team missed the holiday season, and it was deemed much too costly at $295. But the following year it tried again. It now cost only $99, and was faster and more exciting than its rivals (it included a video clip of the Israel–Arab Oslo peace accord that occurred only a few weeks before its release). It received solid but not rave reviews, yet the sales were phenomenal.

Encarta sold 120,000 copies in the 1993 holiday period alone, and production couldn’t keep up with demand. In its first year 350,000 copies were ordered, and 1 million the year after. Clearly, no encyclopaedia had ever sold like this.

Initially, users didn’t seem to mind that they were reading a less-than-great series of articles; the fact they were accessing such a fast reference tool on a screen, without a visit to the library or an outdated print volume, was appealing enough, and the audiovisual buzzes were fun too. A modern encyclopaedia may even have appealed to the modern child the way it was supposed to in the adverts, although most of their time with Encarta was probably spent clicking on the videos. Over the next few years, Microsoft did much to increase the quality of its product, meeting an educational responsibility it had never expected to bear.

‘We consciously invested in the contextual value,’ wrote Tom Corddry, Encarta’s former team leader, on the New York Times website in 2009. ‘In expanding the core content, in creating the world’s first truly global encyclopedia, and in an efficient update cycle. We had enough “multimedia” in the original product to keep the reviewers happy, but focused on the overall usefulness of the whole product much more than on the relative handful of video clips.’

Corddry disputes the idea that Funk & Wagnalls’ original text was low quality compared to Britannica. For Encarta’s needs it was almost ideal: its ‘structured data’ ensured a consistency of text from one article to the next, easing the construction of a highly efficient set of links and navigational tools across the entire content.

Britannica, by contrast, was a bloated mishmash,’ Corddry maintained, ‘a consequence of its long tradition of having articles written by many different celebrity authors … I’d argue that within its first five years, Encarta became the best encyclopedia in history: it had tremendously consistent quality and usefulness across a very broad range of topics, and added a great deal of value by the relationships it illuminated between topics.’

All of this has since been rendered a bit quaint, the Encarta chief conceded, but in its day it did more than unsettle the traditional print encyclopaedia – ‘it pretty much destroyed it.’

In 1990, the last year it saw a profit, Britannica made $40 million on a sales revenue of $650 million. That year it sold 117,000 printed sets, but by the time revenue dropped to $453 million in 1994 it was selling only 51,000, and a large proportion of its sales force (2000-plus in 1990) was being laid off.

‘We need capital and are confident we can secure it,’ said Peter B. Norton, the company’s president, in a statement in April 1995. But Britannica, Inc. took more than a year to find a buyer, and when it did, the Swiss investor Jacob Safra paid only $130 million, a fraction of its value in the 1980s. By 1996, revenue had fallen to $325 million, sales were just a few thousand sets each year, and losses were mounting. At the time of the sale, computers were in more than a third of American homes. The exciting writing was on the screen.

But there was another way of looking at this. Perhaps Britannica and other traditional encyclopaedias had simply misjudged the competition: the boxer it thought it was fighting was actually someone else.

In 2000, Britannica’s fall had been studied by two senior vice-presidents of the Boston Consulting Group. In the opening pages of Blown to Bits, their account of what they call ‘the new economics of information’, Philip Evans and Thomas S. Wurster considered that the company simply underestimated the challenge. ‘Judging from their inaction, Britannica executives at first seemed to have viewed the CD-ROM encyclopaedia as an irrelevance: a child’s toy, one step above video games. This perception was entirely reasonable.’*

One reason for this was a predicament they shared with almost every other traditional business: old incumbents were saddled with ‘legacy assets’ – bricks and mortar, sales and distribution teams, mainframe systems. It was just hard to destroy these things. ‘Instead, blame comes into play, and last-ditch financial calculations hit a wall of internal political debates and personal self-protection.’

Then there were the psychological elements. Evans and Wurster argue that the key decision makers at Britannica were blinded by their own history and myths, making them unable to appreciate something that didn’t fit into their collective mental framework. Worse, they failed to see how one of their oldest and most reliable sales principles – parents wanting to do something valuable for their children’s education and feeling bad if they didn’t – had been subconsciously transferred to a new medium. ‘If the fundamental value proposition is assuaging parental guilt, then the fundamental competitor is not Encarta, it is the PC.’ Writing twenty years ago, Evans and Wurster state

Today, when parents are anxious about their children’s performance in school, when they feel guilty about not doing enough to help, they buy a computer. The new PC may never be used for anything other than chat rooms and video games, but parental guilt has again been duly salved. It just so happens that the computer costs about the same amount as

Britannica

. And along with that computer comes a CD-ROM drive. And along with the CD-ROM drive come several free CD-ROMS, one of which is a promotional copy of

Encarta

.

Certainly Encarta did its job. It sold millions of copies, and Microsoft reaped rewards both from the disc and its operating system. That it couldn’t continue being successful forever would have been clear to all those who worked on it, not least to the person who wrote Encarta’s entry on the irrepressible growth of the Internet.

In March 2009 Encarta announced its ‘shuttering’, the phrase suggestive of a shop pulling down its grille as a new supermarket destroys its livelihood. It was indeed stuck in the past, a victim of the speed of technological advance that had once crowned it king. It was almost tragicomic: only twenty years before, it was conceived as the indomitable future. In its last year it dropped its price to $22.95, the clearest indication that almost all of its knowledge was already available elsewhere.

Encarta did try to keep its brand alive online, but it had entered the arena far too late. According to the Internet ratings service Hitwise, two months before it closed, Encarta had just 1.27 per cent of all US Internet traffic to encyclopaedia sites. ‘The category of traditional encyclopedias and reference material has changed,’ Microsoft announced, a rare understatement in a world of hyperbole. ‘People today seek and consume information in considerably different ways than in years past. As part of Microsoft’s goal to deliver the most effective and engaging resources for today’s consumer, it has made the decision to exit the Encarta business.’

This was a huge admission of defeat (from such a huge corporation). It had been beaten by its inability to keep pace – with popular demand, with the spread of information itself. What Encarta achieved above all was expectation: as computer users engaged in information retrieval, we came to anticipate constant progress and increasing value; our insatiable desire for all the knowledge in the world would not content itself with a noisily whirring disc of coated plastic.



VIETNAM (a diversion …)


Joey Tribbiani is removing the chewing gum from the underside of a small metal patio table in his New York apartment when he hears a knock at the door. There is a big man waiting there, and he has a big question:

‘Good afternoon. Are you the decision maker of the house?’ This is the salesman’s classic opener: even a child might find it hard to answer ‘no’ to this one. But Joey hesitates. He looks around his apartment. He is alone, but still he pauses. He opens his mouth, still pondering. All he can offer is ‘Er …,’ so the salesman intervenes.

‘Do you currently own a set of encyclopaedias?’

This one Joey can answer. ‘No,’ he says, ‘but try the classifieds – people sell everything in there.’

The salesman says he’s not buying, but selling, and he offers his hand as he asks him another question. Do Joey’s friends ever have the sort of conversations during which he just nods along, not quite sure what they’re talking about? Cue the flashback of Joey nodding along as his friends sit around talking about something ‘unconstitutional’; and then one in which they refer to something as ‘the Algonquin’s kids’ table’. Joey is clueless, but he laughs along heartily with his buddies nonetheless.

The salesman notes that Joey has been silently flashing back for about two and a half minutes. He wonders, ‘Are you at all interested?’ ‘Sure,’ Joey says, ‘come on in.’ The salesman already has a volume in his hand, the one with the letter V. They sit down at the patio furniture and the salesman wonders what Joey knows about Van Gogh. Not much, apart from the fact that he cut off his ear ‘because he sucked’. Selecting another page brings another question: where does the pope live? In the woods, Joey says. The next flick-through brings up Vulcanized Rubber. After an ad break the volume has moved from the salesman’s hands to Joey’s, and he realises there’s a lot he didn’t know about Vomit.

The whole set can be his for $1200, or $50 per book. Joey is astonished that the salesman thinks he may have that much to spend. Asked how much he can actually afford, he offers ‘Zero down, and zero a month for a long, long time.’ He starts to empty out his pockets: a baby Tootsie Roll, a movie stub, keys, a Kleenex, a rock, but as the salesman turns to go he finds a $50 note, and he thinks for a moment that he must be wearing his friend’s jeans. This $50 buys him one book, and rather than take the A volume, Joey decides to stick with the V.

The pay-off comes at Central Perk. As Joey’s friends talk of relationships, he mentions how one particular girlfriend could blow up ‘like that Vesuvius’. When his friends question why they’re suddenly talking about volcanoes, Joey says he’s happy to talk about something else. Vivisection? The vas deferens? The Vietnam War? But when Monica asks whether anyone else saw that documentary about the Korean War, Joey is once again all knitted brows and confusion.

That was in October 1997, from Friends’ fourth season, ‘The One with the Cuffs’, with Matt LeBlanc as Joey, Penn Jillette as the salesman. To this day, Jillette says, whenever he does a magic show anywhere in the world, someone always comes up to him afterwards and asks about his Friends appearance. Selling is all about vocation, Jillette tells them. And about volume.




* See encyclopedia-titanica.org.

* ‘The Reference Wars: Encyclopaedia Britannica’s Decline and Encarta’s Emergence’, April 2016.

* They could be forgiven for underestimating the speed at which home ownership of personal computers would increase. About 8 per cent of US households had a PC in 1984. Five years later it was 15 per cent. When Encarta became successful in 1993 the figure was 23 per cent.

* The Grolier Multimedia CD-ROM would come bundled with the Mac II, and although Apple still only had a relatively small market share in the early 1990s, it was making steady inroads into desktop publishing, appealing in particular to the less office-orientated, more creative side of the market. For a thorough analysis of the contents of the main players in the early days see Henry Jay Becker, ‘Encyclopedias on CD-ROM: Two Orders of Magnitude More Than Any Other Educational Software Has Ever Delivered Before’ (Educational Technology, vol. 31, no. 2, February 1991).

* They really did sell it like bargain crackers. An advertisement for the A&P chain from this time offered the ‘Eldorado Deluxe’ edition of its Standard Reference set – gilded page tops – for half the regular price if purchased in-store. ‘Only 49 cents for Volume No 1 and $1.49 each for the other volumes of the set with money-saving coupons. Make it a habit to pick up an additional volume every time you shop.’ An entire encyclopaedia for about $30: not much more than British subscribers were paying in the 1780s.

* Blown to Bits: How the New Economics of Information Transforms Strategy, by Philip Evans and Thomas S. Wurster (Harvard Business Review Press, 1999). The reference to video games is perhaps doubly unfortunate, given that this industry now generates billions of dollars in worldwide sales (in 2018 one estimate put this figure at $135 billion).

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