By 1995, the company had put itself up for sale, and the price of the digital Britannica suddenly went through the floor. This result did not come from a position of strength: In 1994, the company sold just 51,000 print sets, less than half what it sold just four years earlier, according to The New York Times. And eventually, it caught up with them.Įncyclopaedia Britannica made a belated 1994 debut on the market, pricing its CD-ROM at $995, ten times the price of Encarta at the time. The problem was that World Book and Britannica were not trying to sell Cadillacs, but rather fast horses that weren't designed to drive down the information superhighway. (Considering the World Almanac was being sold for less than $6 in printed form at the time, it was a tad expensive.)
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But starting off wasn't cheap or easy: According to InfoWorld, Microsoft agreed to let Bookshelf be bundled with an early CD-ROM in 1987, at a cost of $1,099 for the full package-or, with inflation added, $2,400 today. Basically, these products existed as loss leaders of sorts for Microsoft, ways to ensure that the mainstream public got hooked on computers.
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Tom Corddry, the head of Microsoft's multimedia projects during the 1990s, discussing in an interview with Business Insider how it approached its reference products, particularly Encarta, which was released in 1993, but also Bookshelf, a program first released in 1987 that integrated reference materials from the World Almanac, the Chicago Manual of Style, and Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, among other reference materials. "We knew from the beginning that we were a temporary business, eventually to be overtaken by the internet." And Grolier Electronic Publishing knew the direction that things were going years before any of its competitors did. Compared to better-known volumes, the price difference was even more stark. Even though the navigation was being done on remote-driven device rather than something where you could copy-paste data and quote from it in a report, it was still better than the alternative in so many ways. But it still beat out the cost of the physical encyclopedia.
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There's a rich library of music and movie titles available on the high-grade and laser disc medium, at prices lower than videotape equivalents.Īnd remember, Laserdisc was not a cheap medium in the 1980s. With the laser player, you also wind up with a wonderful entertainment programming source. A Pioneer PR-8210 laser disc player with remote control goes for about $450, so you're still ahead, even with the hardware investment.
The printed, 21-volume version of the Academic American costs $650 the laser disc treatment is $89.95.
We were still in the period before CD-ROMs were even on the market in any meaningful way, so Arete, which was acquired by the encyclopedia publisher Grolier in 1985, put its energy into getting its multi-volume encyclopedia onto a Laserdisc- something called the Grolier KnowledgeDisc.Įven by late 1985 standards, the cost savings compared to a shelf of physical books was fairly impressive, Philadelphia Daily News columnist Jonathan Takiff noted:īetter still, a user isn't just saving on time, energy and shelf space by going with the electronic version, but also is saving big bucks. Aren't databases known for their storage power?"īy 1984, the company had started experimenting with bringing its encyclopedia out in optical disc form. The movie reviews are longer, but there are less than 30 reviews at a time. "For instance, the encyclopedia gives me only three or four short paragraph summaries of anything I look up. "You can get a dab of almost anything you want in CompuServe, but it isn't very substantial," syndicated tech columnist Peter McWilliams wrote. Some felt the offering was broad, but a little skimpy. "Indeed, in approaching retailers this year, it did not even have a finished product."įortunately, Arete had an ace up its sleeve: It was much more flexible about putting its words on different kinds of formats compared to its more established competition, and it quickly partnered with both CompuServe and Dow Jones News Service to bring its encyclopedia to modem-accessible databases as something of an extension of the existing newspaper databases on the services.
"The retail strategy is a radical and risky one, especially for a no-name publisher with no domestic experience or brand identity," Chicago Tribune marketing columnist Elizabeth Brenner wrote in 1980.
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