If you relied on free, gossipy online channels to understand why we were ending the print edition, you got what you paid for: some jokes, some inaccurate observations about the state of our business, and maybe a 20 chance of seeing Encyclopdia Britannica spelled correctly.

The Idea: By the time Britannicas 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.

What many people didnt know was that sales of the print set were by then responsible for only 1 of the business.

The decision to stop printing it was, the author writes, a nonevent.

Busy families had less patience for personal solicitations, and PCs had started shipping with CD-ROM drives, which created a demand for multimedia and interactivityunknown territory for print-focused editorial and product teams.

By 1996, the year Cauz joined the company, sales were down to 3,000 units.

Wikipedias success reinforced EBs strategic decision to reduce reliance on consumer reference and accelerate activity in the K12 market.

The company aggressively overhauled its editorial operation; now content is updated on Britannica Online every 20 minutes.

Today, the author writes, the business is growing on all measures: revenue, margins, staff, content, and reach.

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.

In fact, our employees held a party the day of the announcement, celebrating the fact that Britannica was still a growing and viable company.

They ate the print setin the form of a cake that pictured the 32-volume, 129-pound encyclopedia.

They displayed 244 silver balloonsone for each year the encyclopedia had been in print.

They toasted the departure of an old friend with champagne and the dawning of a new era with determination.

Given how little revenue the print set generated, and given that we had long ago shifted to a digital-first editorial process, the bound volumes had become a distraction and a chore to put together.

They could no longer hold the vast amount of information our customers demanded or be kept as up-to-date as todays users expect.

On Twitter, one person wrote, Im sorry I was unfaithful to you, Encyclopedia Britannica, Wikipedia was just there, and convenient, it meant nothing.

But although most people seemed to know what was happening, some misunderstood.

In fact, the internet enabled us to reinvent ourselves and open new channels of business.

Our content model was dismissed as vintage, but it is actually anything but: We update our content continually, with community input, reaching tens of millions of people every dayand they pay for it.

Value Of Encyclopedia Britannica