But when the Oxford English Dictionary goes out of print, I quirk an eyebrow and frown a bit. When the Encyclopedia Britannica is no longer printed, then I get really depressed.
I mean, really? After 244 years?
I can hear it already.
Isn't it easier to look up online?
It was never about being easy. Well, no, I take that back. It was about being easy. But it was also about having fascinating articles written by the heads (and inventors) of the fields. Having experts write an article describing something, and having it carefully edited by professional editors, and written in such a way that you always ended up with every single finger marking a different page because you couldn't help but hop back and forth between articles. That's what it was about.
Wikipedia is fine, in a sense. But it is generally poorly written and poorly edited. No, really. It is written by people who don't know how to write, and edited by people who know nothing about editing. I have both written and edited my fair share of articles on wikipedia, but I freely and fully admit that my stuff in no way compared to the craftsmanship that went into EB.
I remember many years ago as a gift my step father bought me the CD rom version. I still have it in my collection. It included a section (which I've never seen since) of famous articles of interest written by famous people. Articles like Houdini writing on escapism. Or Lon Chaney writing an article on how to do make up. You simply can not get this kind of stuff on wikipedia.
If it weren't for the fact that a print copy of the 2010 edition costs $1,400, I would unquestionably buy it. Didn't we all want one back in the 80's, with the dumb commercial with that annoying kid?
Damn that's depressing.
Oh, and as for things like Amazon's self-publishing of e-books. I don't have a problem with it in principle except for one thing. There is no editor. And every single author needs his or her book edited, hands down, no question.