This is not just another format. In the long term, digital media will fundamentally destabilize the way we do business. Usually, people talk about the revolution in digital media in terms of putting interactivity within the product itself. But the real revolution is in the market.
Predictor: Esposito, Joe
Prediction, in context:For a 1995 article for Wired magazine, Robert Rossney covers the possible extinction of encyclopedias as known in the 20th century, interviewing Joe Esposito, president of Encyclopaedia Brittanica. Rossney writes: ”Do we really need an online encyclopedia to satisfy our craving for information? Think about it. The encyclopedia is an artifact of the Enlightenment notion that the universe is rational and finite, and can be understood once and for all – if we just put our heads together and work at it. But this idea stands in stark contrast to a postmodern worldview in which every aspect of knowledge is impossibly complex: simply summarizing an area of knowledge does violence to the truth, omitting more than it reveals. Hence, isn’t putting a summary of the world’s knowledge on the Web a spectacularly useless thing to do? … The great advantage to putting the encyclopedia online is that it vastly expands the number of subjects an encyclopedia can cover, since the amount of digitized information it can hold has virtually no limit. Its content can evolve over time, without regard to the limitations of space and print distribution economics … Joe Esposito, the president of Encyclopaedia Britannica, North America, believes that Britannica Online is the key to the company’s future. ‘This is not just another format,’ he says. ‘In the long term, digital media will fundamentally destabilize the way we do business. Usually, people talk about the revolution in digital media in terms of putting interactivity within the product itself. But the real revolution is in the market.’ And it is a revolution. Over the last five years, encyclopedia publishing as an industry has become quietly desperate. When sales started dipping industrywide in 1989, publishers blamed the recession and gritted their teeth. But when the recession ended, sales didn’t bounce back.”
Date of prediction: January 1, 1995
Topic of prediction: Getting, Sharing Information
Subtopic: Publishing
Name of publication: Wired
Title, headline, chapter name: Encyclopaedia Brittanica Online? Given that the Web Itself is Becoming the Sum of the World’s Knowledge, isn’t Putting the Encyclopaedia Britannica Online a Spectaculary Useless Thing to Do?
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.08/brittanica_pr.html
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Anderson, Janna Quitney