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THE GREAT IDEAS ONLINE A Syntopical Approach to the Great Books
ONLINE BRITANNICA NOW FREE! Fee-based service becomes one based on advertisements Oct. 19 -- Encyclopaedia Britannica on Tuesday stopped charging Web users and started giving its content away in a bid to remain a player in the information market. The 32-volume encyclopedia is now free online, the catch being that you have to wade through ads. ''While much of the information on the Internet is free, the Encyclopaedia Britannica represents perhaps the first major reference work of recognized quality to be available at no cost.'' --Encyclopaedia Britannica In essence, the publisher has joined most other online media models, going from a fee-based service to an ad-based one. The entire Britannica -- from a-ak (an ancient East Asian music) to Zoroastrianism (a Persian religion) -- can be found at the Chicago company's retooled site at www.britannica.com . Hoping to emulate the success of Amazon, Yahoo and others, the site also offers current information from newspapers, news agencies and 70 magazines as well as community services such as e-mail, weather forecasts and financial market reports.
''MOMENTOUS DAY'' "Purchasing the Encyclopaedia Britannica was once a major milestone in a family's life, but today we are fulfilling our promise to make it more accessible to more people worldwide," said Don Yannias, the new company's chief executive officer. And the company, in a statement, noted that "While much of the information on the Internet is free, the Encyclopaedia Britannica represents perhaps the first major reference work of recognized quality to be available at no cost. It marks another first for Britannica, which brought the first encyclopedia to the Internet five years ago."
TRYING TO KEEP UP Encyclopaedia Britannica had revenue of $650 million and a sales force of 2,300 at its peak in 1989. Revenue estimates are no longer available from the privately held company, where the work force is thought to number about 350. The company lost ground badly when Microsoft, after being spurned by Britannica, teamed with discount-market encyclopedia publisher Funk & Wagnalls to produce a colorful, multimedia encyclopedia on CD-ROM in 1993. (MSNBC is a joint venture owned in part by Microsoft.) Britannica's own CD-ROM version, released a year later, was low on graphics and did not fare well. It also became the first encyclopedia available on the Web in 1994, but the reception was muted by the $85-a-year subscription fee. House calls by salesmen, once a company trademark, were dropped in 1996.
ENCARTA RESPONSE "We already have robust free content online," Craig Bartholomew said, referring to some free Encarta material on the Web. Britannica, he claimed, has "nothing to lose" and was making a "desperate" move to save its product. MSNBC Staff and Wire Reports -- MSNBC's Miguel Llanos and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR Max, I regret don't usually have more time to contribute to the wonderful Great Ideas Online discussions. But as Providence would have it (pardon my slipping into a theological mode), I have a moment to pass on a few comments. Wing-Chiu Ng of Hong Kong refers to theologian/philosopher Dr. Gordon Clark. Dr. Clark was an American Calvinist who espoused Presuppositionalism, the theological notion that everyone must assume or presuppose a theological stance toward reality, either for or against God's revealed Word. Clark belonged to a camp sometimes known as Rational Presuppositionalism, which is the view that, starting with the presupposition of the truth of Christianity, one can show that Christianity alone is self-consistent. All other systems of thought can, on this view, be shown to include some internal contradiction and therefore must be false. Rational Presuppositionalism is distinguishable from the other major form of Presuppositionalism sometimes known as Revelational Presuppositionalism, which doesn't posit the principle of non-contradiction as a necessary test of truth, but holds that the Christian presupposition alone makes sense of life, the universe, history, etc. By the way, Clark and other Presuppositionalists are fundamentally hostile to the notion of a purely natural knowledge of God. They reject all arguments for God's existence, not because they deny or are uncertain about God's existence, but, on the contrary, because they regard natural knowledge of God to contradict God's sovereignty and to imply an epistemologically independent stance of the human mind vis-a-vis God. In philosophical terms, Gordon Clark (and Presuppositionalists like him) seems to operate with only one epistemological principle -- the coherence theory of truth. For him (and for them), consistency is the sole criterion of truth and inconsistency the sole criterion of falsity. Furthermore, one could describe the theological position Dr. Clark espoused as fideist, at least in the sense that it depends upon divine revelation as the fundamental datum by which everything else is to be understood. Mark Brumley [Mr. Brumley is a member of the Center and the Managing Editor of The Catholic Faith and Catholic Dossier, published by Ignatius Press, San Francisco.]
Dear Max, Many thanks for the sheaf of things that you sent to me day before yesterday. I was delighted to get every one of them, and I look forward to more communication with you and the Center. The pieces evoked so vividly so many things that have meant a great deal to me over the years. Perhaps I should add a detail or two: I was an undergraduate at the University of Chicago in the years 1934-1938, then I continued as a graduate student specializing in Romance Languages. When the war started at the end of 1941, I went to Washington to work in the War Department as a cryptanalyst. Late in '42 I got into the Air Force, spent four years in France and Germany doing the same sort of work, and then came back to the University in the Spring of '46. I finished the dissertation in the Fall and was granted the Ph.D. By then I had already had the good luck to be appointed to the College French Department, and for the next seven years I taught French and the Humanities 3 course (both in French and English) until 1953, when I went off to Dartmouth on a trail that finally ended at the University of Virginia, from which I retired in 1991. But to return to my starting point in the preceding paragraph: those documents that you sent me, and especially The Autobiography of an Uneducated Man called up the wonderful excitement for me of the period 1934-38. The New Plan was by then in flower, with some very remarkable courses and teachers. President Robert Hutchins and Professor Mortimer Adler kept just about all of us, students and faculty, in a stir, and engaged in a kind of dialogue (occasionally you might say that it became a kind of argument!) that I shall never forget. Well, that is enough for now. Once more, thank you for the material you sent, and until next time, Sincerely yours, Hugh M. Davidson
Adler on the Great Idea of Beauty "I would have wished to write this in a philosophical manner not disappointing to its readers, not failing to provide the clear and precise statement about what beauty objectively consists in, which they have good reason to expect. I have failed for two reasons. One is that I am not able to find that clear and precise statement in the literature of the subject. The other is that I lack the insight or wisdom needed to supply it myself. Disappointed readers must, therefore, convert their dissatisfaction by transforming it into a challenge -- to do for themselves what has yet to be done by anyone. To do what? To say what is common to -- what universal qualities are present in -- the admirable beauty of a prize-winning rose, Beethoven's Kreutzer Sonata, a triple play in the ninth inning of a baseball game, Michelangelo's Pieta, a Zen garden, Milton's sonnet on his blindness, a display of fireworks, and so on." My response: Wouldn't that "commonality" (new word, thanks to the 90s "speak") be the effect that experiencing each of these has on one? And how does one describe that effect? I would say, the uninterrupted contact with the spark of the Divine; a step toward the threshold of His awesome Presence! Sara Lockwood
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Revised 25 October 1999 |