Encyclopaedia Britannica vs Wikipedia

EB has finally decided to discontinue its expensive print version of the Encyclopaedia. It's a decision that has been a long time in coming, despite the obvious signs for the past ten years or so that expensive print books are no longer a viable way to disseminate information. EB has been grappling with this reality for many years, while continuing to lose money on its print version and experimenting with its website. The website version has been charging fees for several years, but has run directly up against Wikipedia, which offers its contents for free.

The Britannica dilemma typifies the difficulty that information providers have been running into since the advent of the Web. There is so much information available on the web for free that people are not willing to pay for information at all. Users have in fact come to expect information to be free.

This expectation appears to ignore two basic facts of life. One is that if information is only provided for free, professionals who are best able to provide that information will not do so. They will not be willing to work for nothing. That puts information provision into the hands of the amateurs, who for the most part produce an inferior product. We see this on the web regularly. There is a lot of information there - you can Google anything - but a lot of that information is misinformation or otherwise wrong or incomplete. To some extent, users can distinguish the good from the bad, but often they can't. Or don't.

A major difference between EB and Wikipedia is that EB has traditionally been written by acknowledged global experts on a particular subject while Wikipedia can be written by anyone, with some cursory editorial oversight. However the fact that EB is likely to be the most knowledgable source, it is not enough of a difference to convince people to pay for it. EB's challenge is to come up with a competitive advantage that will actually be convincing to people. It simply hasn't been able to do that yet.

On the other hand, the Wikipedia model is not a viable business model either. Even though the content is written by anyone - some professionals and some amateurs -  for free, there are still costs to maintaining the site. Since there have been no revenues to cover these costs, the site has been relying on donations to keep going. Which means someone is out there who is willing to pay for information. But reliance on donations is almost by definition not a viable business model and it stands to reason that sooner or later, Wikipedia will need to come up with a viable model. They are in the same boat as Encyclopaedia Britannica, just at the other end of the spectrum.

The bottom line is that there needs to be a system to compensate information providers for their efforts. Otherwise, while information will continue to proliferate, quality information will become harder and harder to find. And probably more expensive. Here's an article on the announcement by EB.