Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

• 1. Introduction

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  Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. began not in a corporate headquarters but in Edinburgh, Scotland, during one of history's most fertile intellectual periods: the Scottish Enlightenment. Two men, Colin Macfarquhar and Andrew Bell, set out in 1768 to compile human knowledge into a single work. They hired William Smellie to write most of it. What they started became the world's oldest continuously published encyclopaedia, and the company that grew around it would endure wars, bankruptcy scares, a Sears Roebuck takeover, a Swiss financier's rescue, and the digital revolution that nearly ended it. How did a Scottish print venture survive for more than two and a half centuries? And what does it mean that the final print edition was closed not by fire or war, but by the internet?

• 2. Edinburgh Origins

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  William Smellie compiled most of the first edition's articles, and by 1784 a second edition had followed. When Macfarquhar died in 1793, Andrew Bell took sole ownership and shepherded both the third and fourth editions through the press. Edinburgh publisher Archibald Constable then took over, producing the fifth and sixth editions, until his own death in 1827 forced a sale. A & C Black Ltd. bought the encyclopaedia's copyrights at auction and published it for the next 70 years.

  The ninth edition, which began in 1875, marked a deliberate shift in ambition. Its editors brought in contributors from literature, the social sciences, and the scientific community, widening the scope far beyond what Smellie had attempted. Scholars would later acknowledge it as one of the most impressive collections of scholarship ever produced.

  In 1901, Horace E. Hooper and Walter M. Jackson purchased all copyrights, forming companies in both the United States and England. Hugh Chisholm became the editor responsible for the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth editions, keeping the project's editorial momentum alive into the new century.

• 3. The Sears Chapter

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  In 1915, Sears agreed to market a cheaper version of the eleventh edition aimed at middle-class buyers. Five years later, in 1920, Sears bought Britannica outright. The experiment went badly fast. Within three years Sears reported a loss of $1.8 million, and in 1923 they sold the company back to Hooper's widow and her brother William Cox. Hooper himself had died in 1922.

  Cox and the widow published the twelfth edition in 1922 and the thirteenth in 1926. When Cox could not raise enough money to fund a fourteenth edition, Sears stepped back in to finance it and resumed ownership in 1928.

  By 1932 Sears had restructured the whole sales operation, shutting down retail channels in favour of door-to-door representatives and staffed booths at conventions and shopping centres. Six years later, in 1938, Britannica added an annual publication to its lineup: a yearly synopsis of world events called the Britannica Book of the Year.

• 4. The Benton Era

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  Sears handed Britannica to the University of Chicago in 1941 as an outright gift. The university, unsure it could manage a commercial publisher, accepted the asset but hesitated. William Benton, then the university's vice president, stepped in with an offer: he would put up the operating capital to shield the university from losses. He bought two-thirds of the stock and eventually purchased the remaining third.

  Britannica acquired Merriam-Webster in 1964, and Compton's Encyclopedia in the early 1960s, giving the company control over major reference brands on both sides of the Atlantic. Benton died in 1973, just before the fifteenth edition appeared in 1974 under the new title Britannica 3.

  Britannica 3 was structured in three parts: a ten-volume Micropædia, a 19-volume Macropædia, and a one-volume guide called the Propædia. In 1985 a two-volume index was added. Robert P. Gwinn succeeded Benton as publisher and chairman in 1974, splitting operations into Britannica USA and Britannica International.

  Sales peaked at roughly 120,000 sets in the United States in 1990, with revenue for that year reaching $650 million. The fall was steep. By 1994, only 51,000 sets were being sold in the US, and annual revenue had slipped to $453 million. The company was forced to close more than 70 per cent of its sales offices as the decline continued.

• 5. Digital Pivot

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  Jacob E. Safra, a Swiss financier, bought Britannica in 1996, leading an investment group that took the struggling company private. The restructuring was severe: more than 120 employees were laid off, including many senior staff. Safra also dissolved the home sales force, with an additional 140 people losing their jobs along with 300 independent contractors.

  In 1999, Britannica.com launched, putting the complete encyclopaedia online. A year later the site laid off 20 per cent of its workforce. The company pressed forward anyway.

  In 2009, Britannica printed a Global Edition spanning 30 volumes with over 40,000 articles and 8,500 photographs. That same period saw a sharp strategic turn toward the education sector, with products aimed at institutions rather than household buyers. On the 14th of September 2010, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. announced a partnership with mobile phone development company Concentric Sky to launch iPhone products for the K-12 market. By the 26th of October 2011, Britannica had released an iPad app, and that same year Concentric Sky had ported the Britannica Kids line to Intel Atom-based Netbooks.

  In 2012, after 244 years, the last print edition was closed. The 32 volumes of the 2010 instalment were the final pages printed on paper. All future editions would exist only online.

• 6. After Print

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  ProCon.org, a nonprofit debate resource, was acquired by Encyclopædia Britannica in 2020, adding a new kind of reference material to the company's holdings. That same year Britannica released the Britannica All New Children's Encyclopedia: What We Know and What We Don't, covering major topics for younger readers. It was the company's first children's print encyclopaedia since 1984, and it was widely praised for bringing back the format the parent brand had abandoned eight years earlier.

  In 2018, the company had released Britannica Insights, a Chrome browser extension that supplements Google's featured snippets with sourced information. A year later, in 2019, a partnership with Binumi produced a video product giving schools access to millions of royalty-free multimedia clips for classroom storytelling projects.

  Britannica ImageQuest, a searchable image database, had already launched in 2010. Taken together, these products trace a company that transformed from a door-to-door encyclopaedia salesman into a distributed digital reference network, while its sister brand Merriam-Webster remained a working American dictionary publisher under the same roof.