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Encyclopædia Britannica’s President on Killing Off a 244-Year-Old Product

by Jorge Cauz

Jorge Cauz is the president of Encyclopædia Britannica.

The Idea

By the time Britannica’s top management decided to stop producing bound sets of the iconic encyclopedia, the company had made sweeping changes to put itself at the forefront of the online education market.

One year ago, my announcement that Encyclopædia Britannica would cease producing bound volumes sent ripples through the media world. Despite the vast migration of information from ink and paper to bits and screens, it seemed remarkable that a set of books published for almost a quarter of a millennium would go out of print. But in our Chicago offices this wasn’t an occasion to mourn. In ...