p2pnet - rss feed: Online Encyclopedia Britannica: Free!
p2pnet news | P2P:- Which would you rather do? Lash out $1,400 for the 32 volume Britannica with 65,000 articles and 44 million words?
Get it online for $70 per year?
Or, if you’re blogger, access the online version for free through Britannica Webshare so you can, in effect, cross pollinate the famed reference encyclopaedia online?
“Britannica WebShare is a program that makes it easy for Web publishers to use the information in the Encyclopaedia Britannica for their own research and to share it by providing their readers easy access to individual articles,” says britannicanet.
“Anyone who publishes regularly on the Internet - bloggers, webmaster, and writers who publish on the Web - is eligible for a free subscription to Britannica Online, which includes the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica as well as other encyclopedias, an atlas, a dictionary, thesaurus, links to valuable Web sites selected by our editors, and more.
“What’s more, anyone with a Web site can link to a Britannica article - or multiple articles - and readers who click on the links will see the articles in their entirety, even if the article is normally available only to paying subscribers.”
TechCrunch isn’t, however, terribly impressed, although it concedes “Britannica is doing a lot of things right”.
It has a -”relatively small staff of a hundred or so editors” who manage “4,000 unpaid (I believe) contributors who are recognized experts in their field,” says the post, “But, like the music labels, they still somehow feel as though people should pay to consume their content. And that means search engines can’t index their content. And that means they don’t exist.”
So, “Instead of going free and opening up to all, they’re using the new program to simply price discriminate. Give people who may link to the site free access. Everyone else has to pay.”
IN other words, adds the story, “they’re aiming to be half pregnant - they want the benefits of web linking but don’t want to give up the subscription fees from the fools who continue to pay them.”
TechCrunch - Encyclopedia Britannica Now Free For Bloggers, April 18, 2008
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April 22nd, 2008 at 9:33 am
I would love to own the huge book set. It’d look great in my livingroom. I wouldn’t ever read or even open it, just like I never visit the site, but man would it look cool.
April 22nd, 2008 at 10:49 am
*cough* Babylon *cough*
April 22nd, 2008 at 3:09 pm
yeah, gotta admit, 32 volume book series wouldn’t get read, it would just sit there, looking ever so pretty…
April 22nd, 2008 at 8:08 pm
A post is not complete without a download link
For example, this one: http://thepiratebay.org/search/britannica/0/99/0
April 23rd, 2008 at 12:09 am
I’ll be honest. I have a full set of Encyclopedias right here next to me.
99% of the time, I can get a faster answer from Google. I do still use them for reference though, even if they are 20 years old.