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The Encyclopædia Britannica is a general encyclopedia published by Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., a privately held company. Its articles are written by a staff of 19 full-time editors and over four thousand expert contributors, and are targeted at educated adult readers. The Britannica is widely considered the standard by which other encyclopedias are measured.

The Britannica is the oldest English-language encyclopedia still in print. It was first published between 1768 and 1771 in Edinburgh and quickly grew in popularity and size, with its third edition in 1801 reaching 20 volumes. Its rising stature helped with the recruitment of eminent contributors, and the 9th edition (1875–1889) and the 11th edition (1911) are regarded as landmark encyclopedias for scholarship and literary style. Beginning with the 11th edition, the Britannica gradually shortened and simplified its articles to make them more accessible and broaden its North American market. In 1933, the Britannica became the first encyclopedia to adopt a "continuous revision" policy, in which the encyclopedia is continually reprinted and every article updated on a regular schedule.

The current edition (the 15th) has a unique three-part structure: a 12-volume Micropædia of short articles (each generally having fewer than 750 words), a 17-volume Macropædia of long articles (having from two to 310 pages) and a single Propædia volume intended to give a hierarchical outline of all human knowledge. The Micropædia is meant for quick fact-checking and as a guide to the Macropædia. Readers are advised to study the Propædia outline to understand a subject's context and to find other, more detailed articles. The size of the Britannica has remained roughly constant over the past 70 years, with about 40 million words on half a million topics. Although the Encyclopædia Britannica has been published in the United States since 1901, the Britannica has maintained its traditional British spelling.

Comments
be broken in two?
 * 1) I believe that there are more works than just the Micropedia, the Macropedia and the Propedia.
 * 2) Should the sentence
 * 1) Would it be better to write "Although it has been published in the United States", rather than "publication has been based in the United States"?

Over the course of its history, the Britannica has had difficulty remaining profitable, a problem faced by many encyclopedias. Ownership of the Britannica has changed many times, with past owners including the Scottish publisher A & C Black, Horace Everett Hooper, Sears Roebuck and William Benton. The present owner of Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. is Jacqui Safra, a Swiss billionaire and actor. Recent advances in information technology and the rise of electronic encyclopedias such as Encarta have reduced the demand for print encyclopedias. To remain competitive, the Britannica has relied on its reputation, reduced its price and costs, and developed electronic versions on CD-ROM, DVD and the World Wide Web. Since the early 1930s, the Britannica has also promoted spin-off reference works.

Certain earlier editions of the Britannica have been criticized at times for inaccuracy, bias and lack of authority. The accuracy of the present edition has also been questioned, although such criticisms have been disputed by the Britannica's management.

Comments

 * 1) I would favor


 * 1) I would favor

Editions


The Britannica has been printed in 15 official editions, with several supplements and re-organizations. Throughout its history, the editing of the Britannica has been guided by two aims: to be an excellent reference book and to provide educational material for those who wish to study. For the current edition, the 15th, a third goal was adopted: to systematize all of human knowledge.

Eras
The history of the Britannica can be divided into five main eras.

In the first era (1st–6th editions; 1768–1826), the Britannica was managed by its original founders, Colin Macfarquhar and Andrew Bell, and by their friends and relations, such as Thomas Bonar, George Gleig and Archibald Constable. The Britannica was first published between 1768 and 1771 in Edinburgh as the Encyclopædia Britannica, or, A dictionary of arts and sciences, compiled upon a new plan. It was primarily a Scottish enterprise, as symbolized by its thistle logo, the floral emblem of Scotland.

The founding of the encyclopedia is one of the most famous and enduring legacies of the Scottish Enlightenment. In this era, the Britannica moved from being a three-volume set written by one young editor (1st edition) to a 20-volume set written by numerous authorities. Although several other encyclopedias competed with the Britannica, such as Rees's Cyclopaedia and Coleridge's Encyclopaedia Metropolitana, these competitors either went bankrupt or were left unfinished due to disagreements among their editors. By the close of this era, the Britannica had developed a network of illustrious contributors, primarily through personal friendships with the editors, most notably Constable and Gleig.



During the second era (7th–9th editions; 1827–1901), the Britannica was managed by the Edinburgh publishing firm, A & C Black. Although some contributors were again recruited through personal friendships of the chief editors, most notably Macvey Napier, others were attracted by the Britannica's ever-improving reputation. The contributors often came from other countries and included some of the world's most respected authorities in their fields. A general index of all articles was included for the first time in the 7th edition, a practice that was maintained until 1974. The first English-born editor-in-chief was Thomas Spencer Baynes, who oversaw the production of the famous 9th edition. However, by the close of the 19th century, the 9th edition was outdated and the Britannica itself was facing significant financial difficulties.

In the third era (10th–14th editions; 1901–1973), the Britannica was managed by American businessmen, who introduced aggressive marketing practices, such as direct marketing and door-to-door sales, to increase profits. The American owners also gradually simplified the Britannica's articles, making them less scholarly but more intelligible to the American mass market. The 10th edition was a rapidly produced supplement to the 9th edition, but the 11th edition is still praised for its excellence; its owner, Horace Hooper, lavished enormous effort on its perfection. When Hooper fell into financial difficulties, the Britannica was managed by Sears Roebuck for roughly 18 years (1920–1923, 1928–1943). In 1932, the vice-president of Sears, Elkan Harrison Powell, assumed the presidency of the Britannica and introduced the policy of continuous revision (still practiced today), in which every article is checked and possibly revised at least twice a decade. This was a major departure from earlier practice, in which the articles were not changed until a new edition was produced, at roughly 25-year intervals, with some articles being carried over unchanged from earlier editions. Powell aggressively developed new educational products that drew on the Britannica's reputation. In 1943, ownership passed from Sears Roebuck to William Benton, who managed the Britannica until his death in 1973. Benton also set up the Benton Foundation, which managed the Britannica until 1996. In 1968, near the end of this era, the Britannica celebrated its bicentennial.



In the fourth era (15th edition; 1974–1994), the Britannica introduced its 15th edition, which was re-organized radically into three parts. Under the influence of Mortimer J. Adler, the Britannica sought not only to be a good reference work and educational tool, but also to systematize all of human knowledge, striving to fulfill the dream of the Elizabethan philosopher Francis Bacon. The unfamiliar organization and the absence of an index led to critical condemnation of the 15th edition. In response, the 15th edition was completely re-organized and indexed for a re-release in 1985. This second version of the 15th edition continues to be published and revised; the latest version is the 2007 print version.

In the fifth and current era (1994–present), digital versions of the Britannica have been developed and published on optical media and online. In 1996, the Britannica was bought from the Benton Foundation by Jacqui Safra at well below its estimated value, owing to the company's financial difficulties. The Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. company split in 1999. One part retained the company name and developed the print version, and the other part, Britannica.com Inc., developed the digital versions. Since 2001, these two companies share a single CEO, Ilan Yeshua, who has continued Powell's strategy of leveraging the Britannica's reputation to introduce new information products.

Dedications
The Britannica was dedicated to the reigning British monarch from 1788 to 1901. Upon the sale of the Britannica to an American partnership, editions were dedicated to both the current President of the United States and the British monarch. For example, the 11th edition is dedicated "by Permission to His Majesty George the Fifth, King of Great Britain and Ireland and of the British Dominions beyond the Seas, Emperor of India, and to William Howard Taft, President of the United States of America." The order of the two dedications has changed with the relative power of the United States and Britain, and with the relative sales of the Britannica in these countries; the 1954 version of the 14th edition is "Dedicated by Permission to the Heads of the Two English-Speaking Peoples, Dwight David Eisenhower, President of the United States of America, and Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth the Second". Consistent with this tradition, the 2007 version of the current 15th edition is "dedicated by permission to the current President of the United States of America, George W. Bush, and Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II."

Reputation


Since the 3rd edition, the Britannica has enjoyed a popular and critical reputation for general excellence. Various editions from the 3rd to the 9th were pirated for sale in the United States, beginning with Dobson's Encyclopædia. On the release of the 14th edition, Time magazine dubbed the Britannica the "Patriarch of the Library". In a related advertisement, naturalist William Beebe was quoted as saying that the Britannica was "beyond comparison because there is no competitor." References to the Britannica can be found throughout English literature, most notably in one of Arthur Conan Doyle's favourite Sherlock Holmes stories, "The Red-Headed League". The tale was highlighted by the Lord Mayor of London, Gilbert Inglefield, at the bicentennial of the Britannica.

The Britannica has a popular reputation for containing the sum of human culture. To further their education, many have devoted themselves to reading the entire Britannica, taking anywhere from three to 22 years to do so. When Fath Ali became the Shah of Persia in 1797, he was given a complete set of the Britannica's 3rd edition, which he read completely; after this feat of scholarship, he extended his royal title to include "Most Formidable Lord and Master of the Encyclopædia Britannica." More recently, A.J. Jacobs, an editor at Esquire magazine, read the entire 2002 version of the 15th edition, describing his experiences in the well-received 2004 book, The Know-It-All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World. Writer George Bernard Shaw claimed to have read the complete 9th edition &mdash; except for the science articles. Only two people are known to have read two independent editions: the author C. S. Forester and Amos Urban Shirk, an American businessman, who read the 11th and 14th editions, devoting roughly three hours per night for four and a half years. Richard Evelyn Byrd took the Britannica as reading material for his five-month stay at the South Pole in 1934.

Awards
The Britannica has won many awards. Most recently, the online Britannica won the 2005 Codie award for excellence in reference software; the Codie awards are granted yearly by the Software and Information Industry Association to recognize the best products among categories of software. In 2006, the Britannica was again a finalist. Similarly, the CD/DVD-ROM version of the Britannica received the 2004 Distinguished Achievement Award from the Association of Educational Publishers, and Codie awards in 2001 and 2002.

Criticisms
The Britannica has also received strong criticism, especially as its editions become outdated. It is expensive to produce a completely new edition of the Britannica, and its editors generally delay this for as long as possible (usually about 25 years). For example, despite the policy of continuous revision, the 14th edition had become significantly outdated after 35 years by 1964. When Harvey Einbinder detailed its failings in his 1964 book, The Myth of the Britannica, the encyclopedia was provoked to produce the 15th edition, which required 10 years of work. It is still difficult to keep the Britannica current; one recent critic writes, "it is not difficult to find articles that are out-of-date or in need of revision," noting that the longer Macropædia articles are more likely to be outdated than the shorter Micropædia articles.

Historically, the Britannica's authors have included eminent, even legendary authorities, such as Albert Einstein, Madame Curie and Leon Trotsky. However, some of its contributors have been criticized for their lack of expertise:

With a temerity almost appalling, [the Britannica contributor, Mr. Philips] ranges over nearly the whole field of European history, political, social, ecclesiastical...The grievance is that [this work] lacks authority. This, too &mdash; this reliance on editorial energy instead of on ripe special learning &mdash; may also be counted as "Americanizing": for certainly nothing has so cheapened the scholarship of our American encyclopaedias.

More generally, the Britannica has been criticized for a bourgeois and old-fashioned approach to art, literature and social sciences. For example, the 11th edition was faulted for neglecting the work of Sigmund Freud. As contemporary reviewer Edward B. Titchener put it, "the new Britannica does not reproduce the psychological atmosphere of its day and generation...Despite the halo of authority, and despite the scrutiny of the staff, [...] the great bulk of the secondary articles in general psychology...are not adapted to the requirements of the intelligent reader."

The Britannica is occasionally criticized for its editorial choices. Given its relatively constant size, the encyclopedia has needed to reduce or eliminate some topics to accommodate others, resulting in some controversial decisions. The initial 15th edition (1974-1985) was faulted for having drastically reduced or eliminated its coverage of children's literature, military decorations, and the French poet Joachim du Bellay. Editorial mistakes in the 15th edition were also criticized. Its elimination of the index was condemned, as was the apparently arbitrary division of articles into the Micropædia and Macropædia. Summing up, critic Peter S. Prescott called the edition a "qualified failure…[that] cares more for juggling its format than for preserving information". More recently, reviewers from the American Library Association were surprised to find that most educational articles had been eliminated from the 1992 Macropædia, along with the article on psychology.

Britannica-appointed contributors are occasionally mistaken or unscientific. A well-known example is the chief editor of the 3rd edition, George Gleig, who rejected the established scientific theory of Newtonian gravity and wrote that gravity was caused by the classical element of fire. A more recent example is the credulous article on poltergeists in the 11th edition, a then-popular topic of superstition. The article states that "there remains the chance that some agency of an unexplored nature is, at least in certain cases, actually at work."

Past editions of the Britannica have been marred by racism and sexism. The 11th edition characterizes the Ku Klux Klan as protecting the white race and restoring order to the South after the Civil War, citing the need to "control the negro", to "prevent any intermingling of the races" and "the frequent occurrence of the crime of rape by negro men upon white women." The 11th edition has no biography of Marie Curie, despite her winning the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903 and the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1911. The Britannica employed a large female editorial staff that wrote hundreds of uncredited articles; it also played a key role in denying women the right to better-paying work as typesetters for the 11th edition.

The Britannica has also been criticized unfairly. A well-known example is Willard Huntington Wright's book, Misinforming a Nation , a scathing critique of the inaccuracies and English biases of the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition. This book was itself criticized as an unfair polemic; the New York Times wrote that a "spiteful and shallow temper…pervades the book," and The New Republic opined, "it is unfortunate for Mr. Wright's remorseless purpose that he has proceeded in an unscientific spirit and given so little objective justification of his criticism." A somewhat more credible critic, Joseph McCabe, claimed that the Britannica was susceptible to editorial pressure from the Roman Catholic Church in his book, The Lies And Fallacies Of The Encyclopedia Britanica: How Powerful And Shameless Clerical Forces Castrated A Famous Work Of Reference.

Comment

 * I suspect that McCabe's book was originally published in 1935 as part of his book The social record of Christianity but I am not having an easy time establishing this.


 * It also appears that Willard Huntington Wright's book, Misinforming a Nation was authored by a "S. S. Van Dine". Do I have this wrong?

2007 print version
Since 1985, the Britannica has had four parts: the Micropædia, the Macropædia, the Propædia, and a two-volume index. The Britannica's articles are found in the Micro- and Macropædia, which encompass 12 and 17 volumes, respectively, each volume having roughly one thousand pages. The Macropædia has 699 in-depth articles, ranging in length from 2 to 310 pages and having references and named contributors. In contrast, the Micropædia has roughly 65,000 articles, the vast majority (about 97%) of which contain fewer than 750 words, no references and no named contributors. The Micropædia articles are intended for quick fact-checking and to help in finding more thorough information in the Macropædia. The Macropædia articles are meant both as authoritative, well-written articles on their subjects and as storehouses of information not covered elsewhere.

Information can be found in the Britannica by following the cross-references in the Micropædia and Macropædia; however, these are relatively sparse, averaging one cross-reference per page. Hence, readers are recommended to consult instead the alphabetical index or the Propædia, which organizes the Britannica's contents by topic.

The core of the Propædia is its "Outline of Knowledge," which aims to provide a logical framework for all human knowledge. Accordingly, the Outline is consulted by the Britannica's editors to decide which articles should be included in the Micro- and Macropædia. The Outline is also intended to be a study guide, to put subjects in their proper perspective, and to suggest a series of Britannica articles for the serious student wishing to learn a topic in depth. However, libraries have found that it is scarcely used, and reviewers have recommended that it be dropped from the encyclopedia. The Propædia also has good color transparencies of human anatomy (often missed by readers) and several appendices listing the staff members, advisors and contributors to all three parts of the Britannica.

Taken together, the Micropædia and Macropædia comprise roughly 40 million words and 24,000 images. The two-volume index has 2,350 pages, listing the 228,274 topics covered in the Britannica, together with 474,675 subentries under those topics. The Britannica generally prefers British spelling over American; for example, it uses colour (not color), centre (not center), and encyclopaedia (not encyclopedia). However, there are exceptions to this rule, such as defense rather than defence. Common alternative spellings are provided with cross-references; for example, "Color: see Colour."

Since 1933, the Britannica has been revised on a regular schedule, with at least 10% of its articles considered for revision each year. According to its publisher, 46% of its articles were revised between 2003 and 2006.

The alphabetization of articles in the Micropædia and Macropædia follows strict rules. Diacritical marks and non-English letters are ignored, while numerical entries such as "1812, War of" are alphabetized as if the number had been written out ("Eighteen-twelve, War of"). Articles with identical names are ordered first by persons, then by places, then by things. Rulers with identical names are first organized alphabetically by country and then by chronology; for example, Charles III of France precedes Charles I of Great Britain. Similarly, places that share names are organized alphabetically by country, then by ever-smaller political divisions.

Related printed material
There are several abbreviated Britannica encyclopedias. The single-volume Britannica Concise Encyclopædia has 28,000 articles; Compton's by Britannica, which incorporates the former Compton's Encyclopedia, is aimed at secondary-school-age children and consists of 26 volumes and 11,000 pages. Other products include My First Britannica, aimed at ages six to twelve, and the Britannica Discovery Library, written for pre-school children. Since 1938, the Britannica has published annually a Book of the Year covering the past year's events, which is available online back to the 1994 edition (covering the events of 1993). Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. also publishes several specialized reference works, such as Shakespeare: The Essential Guide to the Life and Works of the Bard

CD-ROM and online versions


The Britannica Ultimate Reference Suite 2006 DVD contains over 55 million words and just over 100,000 articles. This includes 73,645 regular Britannica articles, with the remainder drawn from the Britannica Student Encyclopædia, the Britannica Elementary Encyclopædia and the Britannica Book of the Year (1993–2004), plus a few "classic" articles from early editions of the encyclopaedia. The package includes a range of supplementary content including maps, videos, sound clips, animations and web links. It also offers study tools and dictionary and thesaurus entries from Merriam-Webster.

Encyclopædia Britannica Online is a Web site with more than 120,000 articles that is updated daily. It has daily features, updates and links to news reports from The New York Times and the BBC. Subscriptions cost $69.95 per year in the United States, $81.70 per year in Canada, and £39.99 per year in the United Kingdom. Weekly and monthly plans are also available. Special subscription rates are offered to schools, colleges and libraries. These institutional subscribers constitute an important part of Britannica's business. Articles may be accessed online for free, but only a few opening lines of text are displayed. Beginning in early 2007, the Britannica made articles freely available if they are linked to from an external site. These external links could improve its articles' rankings in search engine results.

Mobile encyclopedia
On 20 February 2007, the Britannica announced that it was working with mobile search company AskMeNow to launch a mobile encyclopedia. Users will be able to send a question via text message, and AskMeNow will search Britannica's 28,000-article concise encyclopedia to return an answer to the query. Daily topical features sent directly to users' mobile phones are also planned.

Coverage of topics
As a general encyclopedia, the Britannica seeks to describe as wide a range of topics as possible. The topics are chosen in part by reference to the Propædia "Outline of Knowledge". The Britannica is composed of articles to geography (26% of the Macropædia), biography (14%), biology and medicine (11%), literature (7%), physics and astronomy (6%), religion (5%), art (4%), Western philosophy (4%), and law (3%). Another study of the Micropædia found that science accounted for 18% of articles, social sciences 17%, geography 25%, biography 17%, and other humanities 25%. However, the Britannica does not cover equivalent topics in equivalent detail. For example, the whole of Buddhism and most other religions are covered in a single Macropædia article, whereas 14 articles are dedicated to Christianity, constituting nearly half of all Britannica religion articles. Nevertheless, the Britannica has been lauded as the least biased of all general encyclopedias marketed to Western readers and praised for its biographies of important women of all eras.

It can be stated without fear of contradiction that the 15th edition of the Britannica accords non-Western cultural, social, and scientific developments more notice than any general English-language encyclopedia currently on the market.

Contributors


The 2007 print version of the Britannica boasts 4,411 contributors, many of whom are eminent in their fields such as Milton Friedman, Michael DeBakey and Carl Sagan. Roughly one-quarter of the contributors are deceased, some as long ago as 1947 (Alfred North Whitehead), while roughly another quarter are retired or emeritus. Most (≈98%) contribute to only a single article; however, there are 64 contributors of three articles, 23 contributors of four articles, 10 contributors of five articles, and 8 contributors of more than five articles. An exceptionally prolific contributor is Dr. Christine Sutton of the University of Oxford, who contributed 24 articles on particle physics.

Staff


Dale Hoiberg, a sinologist, is the Britannica's Senior Vice President and editor-in-chief. Among his predecessors as editors-in-chief were Hugh Chisholm (1902–1924), James Louis Garvin (1926–1932), Franklin Henry Hooper (1902–1938), Walter Yust (1938–1960), Harry Ashmore (1960–1963), Warren E. Preece (1964–1968, 1969–1975), Sir William Haley (1968–1969), Philip W. Goetz (1979–1991), and Robert McHenry (1992–1997). Anita Wolff and Theodore Pappas serve as the current Deputy Editor and Executive Editor, respectively. Prior Executive Editors include John V. Dodge (1950–1964) and Philip W. Goetz.

The Britannica maintains an editorial staff of five Senior Editors and nine Associate Editors, supervised by Dale Hoiberg and four others. These editors are partly responsible for contributing the articles of the Micropædia as well as some sections of the Macropædia.

Editorial advisors
The Britannica has an Editorial Board of Advisors, which currently includes 14 distinguished scholars: former Ecuadorian president Rosalía Arteaga, Physiology/Medicine Nobel laureate David Baltimore, religion scholar Wendy Doniger, political economist Benjamin M. Friedman, Council on Foreign Relations President Emeritus Leslie H. Gelb, Physics Nobel laureate Murray Gell-Mann, Carnegie Corporation of New York President Vartan Gregorian, Pritzker Architecture Prize winner Zaha Hadid, American Civil War historian James M. McPherson, philosopher Thomas Nagel, cognitive scientist Donald Norman, musicologist Don Michael Randel, economist Amartya Sen,  and Stewart Sutherland, Baron Sutherland of Houndwood and a Knight of the Thistle.

The Propædia and its Outline of Knowledge were produced by dozens of editorial advisors. Although roughly half of these editorial advisors have since died, their work lives on in the Britannica. The Propædia also lists just under 4000 authorities who were consulted for  the unsigned Micropædia articles.

Corporate structure
In January 1996, the Britannica was purchased from the Benton Foundation by billionaire Swiss financier and actor Jacqui Safra, who serves as its current Chairman of the Board. In 1997, Don Yannias, a long-time associate and investment advisor of Safra, became CEO of Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. In 1999, a new company, Britannica.com Inc. was spun off to develop the digital versions of the Britannica. Yannias assumed the CEO-ship of the new company, while that of Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. remained vacant for two years. Yannias' tenure at Britannica.com Inc. was marked by missteps, large lay-offs and financial losses. In 2001, Yannias was replaced by Ilan Yeshua, who reunited the leadership of the two companies. Yannias later returned to investment management, but remains on Britannica's Board of Directors.

In 2003, the former management consultant Jorge Aguilar-Cauz was appointed President of Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. Cauz is the senior executive and reports directly to the Britannica's Board of Directors. Despite his subdued and scholarly manner, Cauz has been aggressively pursuing alliances with other companies and extending the Britannica's brand to new educational and reference products, continuing the strategy pioneered by former CEO Elkan Harrison Powell in the mid-1930s.

Under Safra's ownership, the company has experienced financial difficulties, which the company has fought by reducing the price of its products and by drastic cost-cutting measures. According to a 2003 report in the New York Post, the Britannica management has eliminated employee 401(k) accounts and encouraged the use of free images. Unfortunately, these changes have had some negative impacts, as freelance contributors have waited up to six months for checks and the Britannica staff have gone years without pay rises.

Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. now owns registered trademarks on the words "Britannica", "Encyclopædia Britannica", "Macropædia", "Micropædia", and "Propædia", as well as its thistle logo. It has exercised its trademark rights as recently as 2005.

Competition


As the Britannica is a general encyclopedia, it seeks to describe as wide a range of topics as possible. As such, its main competitors are other general encyclopedias. It does not seek to compete with specialized encyclopedias such as the Encyclopaedia of Mathematics or the Dictionary of the Middle Ages, which can devote much more space to their chosen topics.

Throughout its history (but especially after the 9th edition), the Britannica was widely considered to have the highest authority of any general English-language encyclopedia, especially because of its superlatively broad coverage and eminent authors. In its first years, the Britannica’s main competitors were the encyclopedias of Ephraim Chambers and Dennis de Coetlogon and, later, Rees's Cyclopaedia and Coleridge's Encyclopaedia Metropolitana. In the twentieth century, its competitors included Collier's Encyclopedia, the Encyclopedia Americana, and the World Book Encyclopedia. Each of these encyclopedias had their own strengths and found their own market. For example, some were written with exceptional clarity, others with superb illustrations.

Since the early 1990s, the Britannica has faced new challenges from digital information sources. The Internet has developed into a common source of information for many people, facilitated by the development of search engines. Online access to reliable original sources and informational and/or instructional materials has accelerated in recent years with, for example, Google Books, MIT's release of its educational materials and the open PubMed Central library of the National Library of Medicine. In general, the Internet tends to provide broader and more current coverage than does the Britannica, due to the ease with which material on the Internet can be updated. In rapidly-changing fields such as science, technology, politics, culture and modern history, the Britannica has struggled to keep up-to-date, a problem first analyzed systematically by its former editor Walter Yust. The Britannica's pre-eminence has also been challenged by other online encyclopedias, such as Encarta and Wikipedia.

The Britannica's print version has remained relatively costly compared to most of its competitors, due to its high cost of production, staff and distribution. The economic viability of Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. in the Internet era rests on its brand equity and product differentiation, i.e., the public perception that the Britannica is simply the best encyclopedia available at any price.

Print encyclopedias
Comparisons of the Encyclopædia Britannica with other print encyclopedias have been published. A well-known comparison is that of Kenneth Kister, who gave a qualitative and quantitative comparison of the Britannica with two comparable encyclopedias, Collier's Encyclopedia and the Encyclopedia Americana. For the quantitative analysis, ten articles were selected at random (circumcision, Charles Drew, Galileo, Philip Glass, heart disease, IQ, panda bear, sexual harassment, shroud of Turin and Uzbekistan) and letter grades (A–D,F) were awarded in four categories: coverage, accuracy, clarity, and recency (i.e., timeliness, how up-to-date the article is). In all four categories and for all three encyclopedias, the four average grades fell between B- and B+, chiefly because not one encyclopedia had an article on sexual harassment in 1994. In the accuracy category, the Britannica received one D and eight As. Encyclopedia Americana received eight As, and Collier's received one D and seven As; thus, Britannica received an average score of 92% for accuracy to Americana's 95% and Collier's’ 92%. The 1994 Britannica was faulted for publishing an inflammatory story about Charles Drew that had long been discredited. In the timeliness category, Britannica averaged an 86% to Americana's 90% and Collier's’ 85%. A more thorough qualitative comparison of all three encyclopedias caused Kister to recommend Collier's Encyclopedia as the superior encyclopedia, primarily on the strength of its excellent writing, balanced presentation and easy navigation.

Digital encyclopedias on CD/DVD-ROM
The most notable competitor of the Britannica among CD/DVD-ROM digital encyclopedias is Encarta, a modern, multimedia encyclopedia that incorporates three print encyclopedias: Funk and Wagnalls', Collier's and the New Merit Scholar. Encarta is the top-selling multimedia encyclopedia, based on total U.S. retail sales from January 2000 to February 2006. Both occupy the same price range, with the 2007 Encyclopædia Britannica Ultimate CD or DVD costing US$50 and the Microsoft Encarta Premium 2007 DVD costing US$45. The Britannica contains 100,000 articles, Merriam-Webster's Dictionary and Thesaurus (U.S. only), as well having Primary and Secondary School editions. Encarta contains 66,000 articles, a user-friendly Visual Browser, zoomable, interactive maps, math, language and homework tools, a U.S. and U.K. dictionary, and a youth edition. Like Encarta, the Britannica has been criticized for being biased towards United States audiences. For example, the United Kingdom-related articles in Britannica are updated less often, maps of the United States are more detailed than those of other countries, and the Encyclopaedia Britannica lacks a U.K. dictionary. On the other hand, the Britannica's articles are generally regarded as more detailed than those of Encarta. Similar to the Britannica, Encarta is also available online at encarta.msn.com by subscription, although some content may be accessed for free.

Internet encyclopedias
Online alternatives to the Britannica include Wikipedia, a Web-based free-content encyclopedia. The 2007 print version of the Britannica does not mention Wikipedia. Other print encyclopedias such as the 2006 World Book Encyclopedia do discuss Wikipedia. However, the online version of Britannica does include an article about Wikipedia.

A qualitative comparison of the Britannica and Wikipedia has been published. On 14 December 2005, the scientific journal Nature reported that, within 42 randomly selected general science articles, there were 162 mistakes in Wikipedia while Britannica was judged to contain 123 errors. In its detailed 20-page rebuttal, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. characterized Nature's study as flawed and misleading and called for a "prompt" retraction. It noted that two of the articles in the study were taken from a Britannica year book, and not the encyclopedia; another two were from Compton's Encyclopedia (called the Britannica Student Encyclopedia on the company's web site) and yet another reviewer comment refers to an unknown publication. The Britannica rebuttal went on to mention that some of the articles presented to reviewers were combinations of several articles, and other articles were merely excerpts but were penalized for factual omissions. The Britannica also noted that several facts classified as errors by Nature were minor spelling variations, and that several of its alleged "in-corrections" were merely a different interpretation. Nature defended its story and declined to retract, stating that as it was comparing Wikipedia with the web version of Britannica, it used whatever relevant material was available on Britannica's website.

Web traffic is another quantitative metric for comparing the perceived value (also called the perceived level of product differentiation) of two online encyclopedias. Wikipedia received roughly 450 times more traffic than did the online version of the Britannica, based on independent page-view statistics gathered by Alexa, in the first three months of 2007.

Comment

 * What does ("not well qualified") mean?


 * Michael Faraday began as an Encyclopaedia Britannica bookbinder. Is there a way to work this in? Is it appropriate?