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Britannica - would you buy it on (say) Kindle or Nook?

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40hz:
@CW - I saw one of those. It was pretty amazing. About the only thing about it I didn't like was it didn't support tables. So anything that was formatted as a table didn't appear. And it also didn't let you know which things beyond the obvious (like graphics) got left out. No full text search either, which was a problem for me.

Still, for what it was and what it cost it was pretty amazing. (I don't put it even remotely on par with TEB. But for a quick&dirty desk reference, or a take-along on a trip, I could see the the electronic Wikipedia making a lot of sense.)

BTW- I also tried the electronic Britannica. Much like SB, I found it unusable.

CWuestefeld:
I gave the WikiReader to two of my nieces. My sister was slightly miffed, though, because of an article she read on it about rhinoceroses (iirc). Apparently the article discussed the mating habits of the rhino. (I'm not a big fan of limiting access to objective information)

IainB:
I browse and read it for fun and personal edification. I like to turn pages, flip around, pull volumes down at random, and be surprised. I'll often start reading something, follow up on something mentioned, and end up happily sitting with five or six open volumes heaped around me with dozens of paper notes and post-it's sprinkled over everything.
-40hz (March 15, 2012, 09:22 AM)
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You have almost exactly described how I would often use the hardcopy Britannica as a child - it's a sort of "discovery" learning experience, and I would be as happy as Larry in that state. I quite miss doing that now (I don't have my hardcopy Britannica with me now.)
I'm not sure whether you would be able to get that same experience with a smart tablet like Kindle or Nook. Not yet, anyways. I don't have either device, but I don't see how you could have all those pages opened out on the floor strewn around you in some kind of order like that and making notes on bits of paper, all in gestalt view - using a single reading tablet.

I know that's making a case for hardcopy versus tablet, but it seems to me that the ergonomics of using an information tool can make a huge difference to the efficiency and pleasure of learning through a discovery experience. I use a laptop an awful lot for reading complex information whilst working through some client's knotty problem, and though I delight in the speed with which I can pull information and related links up onto the screen, I feel at the same time highly frustrated by the relatively tedious linearity of the whole process I am engaged in, when compared to the exploding connectivity and richness of of that "discovery" experience.

But if I'm working on something on my laptop and I need to jump to a reference in an encyclopaedia, I can see that it would be a meta-change - possibly quite a big step forwards - if I could (say) bring up an authoritative source (e.g., like Britannica) on a tablet, select some reference information from it (related to what I am working on), and then wirelessly xmit that to my laptop for inclusion into a report on my laptop screen.

The DRM constraints in my old PC Britannica forced you to have a Britannica CD-ROM in the drive at all times. That was a pain and it inhibited ergonomic efficiency. Having the Britannica on a tablet - and eventually maybe having my whole reference library on it as well, could be a real incentive for trying the Kindle/Nook path now - just as a first step and a suck-it-and see exercise. My daughter Lily could try it out as well, so it wouldn't be solely an experimental gamble for me, but something potentially useful for her. (She's interested in the idea too.)

wraith808:
I mean, at this point, Britannica is just dying a relatively quick death.  Who really needs it?  Nobody wants or needs your books, anything you put online will be inferior to wikipedia, so either figure out a way to fill a need that is currently unfilled, or...goodbye.
-superboyac (March 15, 2012, 03:35 PM)
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Actually, not.  There's a very good reason for Britannica and other recognized sources to be there- and other than the fact that Wikipedia is crowdsourced, so the information is only as reputable as effort the community puts into it, i.e. unsourced information remains on the site.  That is for education.  Most schools don't accept things sourced from Wikipedia.  In the educational arena for the most part, Wikipedia is persona non grata.

CWuestefeld:
But studies have shown that the quality (i.e., error rate) of Britannica is only somewhat better than Wikipedia -- they're both of similar magnitude.

I fear that the stigma really stems from academia (right down to elementary school) believing in a top-down model, a priesthood of experts who dictate to the masses, whereas WP stands for power from the ground up.

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