Reprint: R1303A
In the spring of 2012, the president of Encylopædia Britannica announced that the company would cease producing bound volumes of the iconic reference work. Some people were shocked, and many assumed that EB had buckled under the internet—specifically, Wikipedia. EB’s content model was dismissed as “vintage.” What many people didn’t know was that sales of the print set were by then responsible for only 1% of the business. The decision to stop printing it was, the author writes, “a nonevent.”
The encyclopedia’s famous door-to-door sales force had reached its peak in 1990 with more than 100,000 units sold. But then the business collapsed. Busy families had less patience for personal solicitations, and PCs had started shipping with CD-ROM drives, which created a demand for multimedia and interactivity—unknown territory for print-focused editorial and product teams. By 1996, the year Cauz joined the company, sales were down to 3,000 units.
This is the story of how Encyclopædia Britannica became savvy—first with CD-ROM, then with the internet, and finally with the learning business. Wikipedia’s success reinforced EB’s strategic decision to reduce reliance on consumer reference and accelerate activity in the K–12 market. The company aggressively overhauled its editorial operation; now content is updated on Britannica Online every 20 minutes. Today, the author writes, the business is growing on all measures: revenue, margins, staff, content, and reach.
Photography: Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. The Idea: By the time Britannica’s top management decided to stop producing bound sets of the iconic encyclopedia, the company had made sweeping changes to put itself at the forefront of the online education market.
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