Subject: Britannica announcement in the New York Times From: duhring@wais.com (John Duhring) Date: Fri, 11 Feb 94 11:14:35 PST
How the Web Was Won
Subject: Britannica announcement in the New York Times From: duhring@wais.com (John Duhring) Date: Fri, 11 Feb 94 11:14:35 PST
Page 1 of the Business Section, Tuesday, Feb 8, 1994 BRITANNICA'S 44 MILLION WORDS ARE GOING ON LINE By John Markoff SAN FRANCISCO -- Encyclopedia Britannica, the publisher of the nation's oldest and most prestigious reference work, said today that it would enter the information age by offering electronic distribution of its materials to universities and some public libraries via the Internet, the world's largest computer network. The development is one of the clearest indications that traditional publishers realize the limitations of offering only hard-bound volumes -- and are concluding that the opportunities of on-line publishing outweigh the risks. "Companies in the electronic publishing market are beginning to see they want the largest possible market," said Christopher Locke, general mangaer of Mecklermedia, a Westport, Conn., publishing and exhibition company. "They don't want to be trapped in markets that are Balkanizeed or private." .. ''This is a blessing for every school kid,'' said Paul Saffo, a researcher at the Institute for the Future in Menlo Park, Calif. ''We've all been there before, the night before we have a paper due in class.'' The 225-year-old Encyclopedia Britannica, which is the oldest continuously published encyclopedia in the English language, will be made available initially to university faculty and students beginning in the fall using a variety of information-retrieval technologies that have been developed experimentally by Internet researchers and that are being quickly commercialized. Encyclopedia Britannica executives said they were also planning to make their reference data base available to a larger commercial audience, but academic distribution would be a first step to ensure that the electronic version of the encyclopedia was well tested. "The whole development process has been an astonishing one for me," said Robert McHenry, editor-in-chief of the Britannica. "I've scrambled pretty hard just to keep up with the technical language." The electronic version of the Encyclopedia Britannica, to be called Britannica Online, is now being tested by students and faculty at the University of California, San Diego. The on-line version includes ''hypertext'' links that cannot be matched by the traditional text version. This technology makes it possible for each article in the encyclopedia to refer to other related works and illustrations. It also seamlessly links together the four components of the encyclopedia: the macropedia, which is the extended version; the micropedia, which is the condensed version; the index, and a broad outline of world knowledge called the propedia. To organize the more than 300 million characters of text and 2,000 illustrations, Encyclopedia Britannica is using retrieval software developed by Wais Inc., a Menlo Park, Calif. software developer. To search the electronic version, students will use networked personal computers and work stations running a program known as Mosaic, developed at the National Center for Supercomputer Applications at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. The software displays documents and illustrations and highlights words and phrases that have links to other documents. By clicking on a highlighted block of text or illustration, it is possible to retrieve a related document automatically from the Encyclopedia Britannica database. Encyclopedia Britannica executives said they would probably price the encyclopedia to universities on a subscription basis, depending on the number of students on campus. However, they said they were still considering a variety of pricing methods for general commercial distribution. One possible plan may be to charge on a reference-by-reference basis. This is made possible by the WAIS and Mosaic software. Currently, online encyclopedias are provided as standard service by on-line publishers like Compuserve, America Online and Prodigy. Encyclopedia Britannica executives said they had decided to become electronic publishers rather than allying themselves with an existing on-line service because of the economics. "The main reason we are doing it ourselves is that you just can't make any money licensing your content," said Joseph J. Esposito, president of Encyclopedia Britannica North America. "If you do believe that content is king, it's rather unfortunate that so many of the content providers have put themselves in a position where they're held hostage to the on-line services." The Encyclopedia Britannica had an earlier experiment with on-line information delivery via the Mead Data Corporation but the agreement ended in 1985 when the two companies could not agree on development costs. "We're creating a new market for content providers," said Larry Smarr, director of the National Center for Supercomputer Applications, which developed the Mosaic browser software. "Here is a whole world of people who are using cyberspace as their informtion stream. They are all potential customers for commercial information providers." From jvncnet!marketplace.com!owner-online-news Mon Feb 28 02:36:40 1994