According to a recent news article (
here), the
Encyclopedia Britannica will no longer appear in a print edition—this for the first time since it was founded in 1768. As of this month, the
Britannica will be available only online. Evidently, the emergence of online encyclopedias in the early 1990s has driven printed encyclopedias out of business, and the
Britannica has managed to survive only because it adapted itself to the virtual world fairly early on. This is just one more bit of proof that the digital age has become dominant almost in the bat of an eyelash. The computer has changed everything. I suppose it is now only a matter of time before I am going to have to give in, buy an iPad, and begin to read books on the thing. As one who grew up in a different era, the digital age is still a bit strange and at times even off-putting. There's no way we would want to go back to typewriters, mimeograph machines, and stand-alone libraries, no way in the world. But, this is a weird age for those of us who grew up without those things, and it is only the tip of the iceberg given all that is coming next in the years to come.
Anyway, I thought you all would want to know that the "real world"
Britannica is no more.
