Artist: Tori Amos
Released: 1994
Lyrical Relic: Encyclopedia
She knows what's going on
Seems we got a cheaper feel now
All the sweeteaze are gone
Gone to the other side
With my encyclopaedia
If you’re 13 years old and have no idea what an encyclopedia is, I might suggest you grab your phone and “Google” it. But first imagine it’s 1994 and you wanted to know what smartphones and Google are. You could go consult a reference book called an encyclopedia, but unfortunately, these books did not foretell the future….so you’d be out of luck. What the encyclopedia could tell you is a little bit about a lot of things. Think Wikipedia’s grandma, in paper.
The information one culled from the encyclopedia was deemed 100% reliable. Unlike a search engine that indexes anything and everything, without filter, you could be confident that the very human editors of the encyclopedia were serving you information without any agenda or errors. Of course, the information could very well be outdated right after it got published, but you didn’t really worry about that.
Encyclopedias, either generalized or specialized in a subject, have been around for about 2000 years. Encyclopaedia Britannica bills itself as the world’s oldest continuously published encyclopaedia, although they no longer publish a print edition.
World Book is the only general reference encyclopedia still published in print today, its client base comprised almost exclusively of public and school libraries. They pride themselves on providing “authoritative content on almost every topic to learners of all ages, from school-age readers (9-18) to adults.” And the 22-volume set can all be yours for the low price of $1099.
At its peak in 1990, World Book was raking in a cool $32 million in profit. This was also the year that Tim Berners-Lee developed the HTTP protocol and the HTML language. He would publish the first-ever website the following year, a harbinger of the galactical shift in how we acquire and consume information. Britannica saw the writing on the wall(web?), and solidified an online presence for itself in 1995.
In 1993, Microsoft released a CD-ROM based encyclopedia, Encarta, but it was short lived. Britannica was ahead of its time when it came to adopting the Web: it has been online since 1995, which pre-dated Wikipedia’s entry to the Web by several years.
Is there still a raison d’être for the encyclopedia? Perhaps. When the Internet goes down and your school report on outer space is due the next day, the encyclopedia could very well be your saving grace.
Sources:
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