Encyclopaedia Britannica (2024)

FAQs

Are Britannica encyclopedias worth anything? ›

The Internet has rendered vintage encyclopedias obsolete and today the value is primarily from people looking to have a set similar to the one that they grew up with. A complete 1967 white britannica encyclopedia sells for $50 or so at auction and for $120 to $150 from antique book dealers.

The encyclopaedia is maintained by about 100 full-time editors and more than 4,000 contributors. The 2010 version of the 15th edition, which spans 32 volumes and 32,640 pages, was the last printed edition. Since 2016, it has been published exclusively as an online encyclopaedia.

Early print editions of the Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica, the oldest English-language general encyclopaedia. The Encyclopædia Britannica was first published in 1768, when it began to appear in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Britannica's content is among the most trusted in the world.

Call your local recycling plant. They may have a specific set of rules for how to dispose of your encyclopedias and may even be able to pick them up from you. You can also use your old encyclopedias as a craft project. Take the photos inside and use them for scrap booking purposes.

Old encyclopedias are attracting collectors primarily for two reasons: scarcity and information. As is the case with all rare books and other collectibles, the more scarce an edition is, the more likely it is to have a bigger spread between supply and demand, and thus the higher the monetary value.

Despite that, some people and organizations apparently still buy paper encyclopedias. Evans said that sales of the print edition are "in the thousands" and that World Book always prints just enough copies to satisfy demand. Enlarge / The Encyclopedia Britannica, a competitor of World Book, ended its print run in 2012.

Older encyclopedias make great set dressing and help fill up bookcases." * Nancy Shore of Salt Lake City says: "I donated my encyclopedia set to a charitable foundation that sent it to a school in the Philippines. There are many countries that would love to have our old books."

We had no need for a wake because we weren't grieving. We had known for some time that this day was coming. 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.

Back then, the Encyclopedia Britannica, one of the most popular versions of the books, sold anywhere from $1,000 to $3,000. It's hard to wrap your mind around the price 30 years later, but it was the go-to source for information at the time.

Is Britannica more credible than Wikipedia? ›

Encyclopædia Britannica also argued that a breakdown of the errors indicated that the mistakes in Wikipedia were more often the inclusion of incorrect facts, while the mistakes in Britannica were "errors of omission", making "Britannica far more accurate than Wikipedia, according to the figures".

There are different types of encyclopedias. Mainly they are divided into four types, namely Dictionaries, Comprehensive Encyclopaedia or Vishwakosh, Encyclopaedic literature or Koshsadrush and Indexes.

The online version of the Encyclopedia Britannica is a trusted source used by more than 4,755 universities worldwide, including Yale, Harvard and Oxford.

What makes Britannica so credible in today's information age? Britannica's editorial content is unmatched by competitors in quality, quantity, and up-to-dateness. Our knowledge is tapped from experts from around the globe, including historians and Nobel Prize winners.

The Encyclopædia Britannica has been published continuously since 1768, appearing in fifteen official editions. Several editions have been amended with multi-volume "supplements" (3rd, 5th/6th), consisted of previous editions with added supplements (10th, and 12th/13th) or gone drastic re-organizations (15th).

Enlarge / The Encyclopedia Britannica, a competitor of World Book, ended its print run in 2012. A World Book rep told Quartz in 2019 that the print encyclopedia sold mostly to schools, public libraries, and homeschooling families.

Encyclopedia Britannica moved online in 2012 (After 244 Years, Encyclopaedia Britannica Stops the Presses ). As of 2019, the price of an annual subscription is specified in their website as $74.95, or $1.44 per week. But you can almost always access the online version through your public library at no cost.

The eleventh edition of Encyclopædia Britannica has become a commonly quoted source, both because of the reputation of the Britannica and because it is now in the public domain and has been made available on the Internet.