QUOTE(EricBarbour @ Tue 13th March 2012, 7:56pm)
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.
Obsolete upon publication? I disagree. I'd take a 20 year old set of Britannicas over Wikipedia any day of the week. (didn't Kohs do exactly that?)
Over time I've become much more sympathetic to content generators trying to make a living at what they do. Out of all the crap to spend money on, encyclopedias are relatively worthy.