It was probably inevitable--for years, only libraries bought the print edition.
Don't feel too bad for them. Try to remember all those housewives who were arm-twisted by encyclopedia salesmen into coughing up a big fat check for a pile of books, that was already obsolete upon publication. Britannica was as guilty of that as any other firm, and they even sat there in the 1990s and quietly bought up most of their competitors, like World Book and Comptons, as they went bankrupt one after another -- because of Encarta. The web came much later.
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