Encyclopaedia Britannica seems to be in trouble. Customers are curiously reluctant to spend $1395 on the print edition of the encyclopedia, disinclined to pay $70/year for web access and even averse to parting with $49.95 for the Britannica Deluxe Edition 2007 DVD.
It appears that knowledge-seekers lean towards the $37.50 Encarta DVD, or, to an even larger extent, the $0 Wikipedia. Internet audience measurer Comcast says that Britannica Online is being out-visited by Wikipedia by a factor of 184:1.
But now the venerable EB is fighting back (kind of). They are launching Britannica Webshare, which is intended to provide more-or-less free access to Britannica content online for ‘Web publishers’ … registration is here.
Some say that Britannica Webshare is a step in the right direction but EB will eventually have to adopt the ‘free’ business model. Others agree saying “Start Writing the Eulogies for Print Encyclopedias” and suggest that specialist-compiled repositories such as the Encyclopedia of Life and Citizendium will become more common in the future.
Encyclopedia Britannica Now Free For Bloggers – Tech Crunch, April 18 2008
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