As strange as it may seem, there is a generation of students entering college now who have never opened an encyclopedia.  Many have never even seen one.  Some, I dare say, don’t know what the word means.

The dictionary tells me that an encyclopedia is a set of books arranged in order that touches on all branches of knowledge.  That seems rather far-fetched, doesn’t it?  That a row of books on a shelf two feet long could touch on all branches of knowledge?  But wait, how about the dictionary?  Or the thesaurus?

My encyclopedia tells me that the Panama Canal opened in 1914.  It took me a few minutes to find the information.  Wikipedia tells me the same thing, in about as many seconds as it takes for me to type the terms.

Image via Wikipedia

We like to imagine that somewhere, some old duffer in half-rim spectacles is still plodding around his teetering stacks of dusty tomes, casually ambling directly to the exact book he wants, to find the answer right where he left it half a lifetime ago — perhaps chuckling condescendingly about not needing any of those newfangled gewgaws.

Ain’t happenin’.

Just about every encyclopedia printed in the last half-century will tell me about the Panama Canal, and when it opened.  Printing a new set of them doesn’t mean that it wasn’t 1914 anymore, so why buy the new set?  Especially since a new set of good ones will run you well over a thousand U.S. dollars, and some over three thousand.  Oof!  Knowledge is expensive!

Except, no it isn’t.  Information is getting cheaper by the minute, because of three things:

1. The Internet brings it to your house.
2. It changes more often.
3. The Open Source movement is making more of it free.

Early in the 20th Century, there were whole platoons of men tramping about the countryside, pushing doorbell buttons and pestering poor housewives into buying a row of encyclopedias to help little Johnny or Suzie get a leg up on their education.  But lets face it, the kids rarely cracked ‘em open.  Don’t believe me?  Walk through any thrift store, and you’ll find a whole set in the corner looking lonely, in brand-new condition save for the dust.

It won’t be that far in the future before people look at a printed encyclopedia the way you and I look at this:

Let’s be generous and say that you used it to look something up three or four times a year as a kid, for maybe half an hour at a time.  Until you left home, whereupon you can be sure your parents never opened them again.  What a testament to successful salesmanship!  And what a great example of a boondoggle.  Hundreds, even thousands of dollars on something that spent 99.99% of the time you owned it on a shelf, or in a box.

Statistically speaking, that’s negligible, within the margin for error, and therefore insufficiently different from zero use at all to be worth mentioning.

The Internet, on the other hand, tends to keep up pretty closely with things as they happen.  Remember, the news of 1914 became the encyclopedia entry of 1965.  And now it’s all indexed, and cross-indexed, and labelled, and there are entire companies who spend billions of dollars per year to find ways to bring you that information a few milliseconds faster than their competitors.  And you and your kids use it every day, for everything from the Panama Canal, to that report on Millard Fillmore, to how to get grape juice out of a carpet.

So, is the encyclopedia dead?  Yes and no.  The printed ones are, yes.  But the concept lives on.  In a sense, we now have the embryo of the Encyclopedia Galactica that Isaac Asimov predicted in his stories.  And I don’t have to worry about my girlfriend asking me to carry it home for her.

O, Funk & Wagnall’s, we hardly knew ye.