Paper Encyclopedias are Disappearing

Paper encyclopedias are becoming an endangered species. We were talking about them the other day at my house over dinner with friends. We all had one. My parents spent who-knows-how-much on a set, as did my wife's parents, and my friends' parents. I remember leafing through them when they would arrive. The paper pages were thick and glossy, and the edges of our World Book series were plated with gold. At least, that's what I believed. My favorite part when the new volume arrived was to crackle the pages, as they came to us slightly stuck together. I'd then breathe in deeply the fumes from the new book. Last, I'd actually read something - usually about planets, or maybe an animal.

But that's all coming to an end. Encyclopedia Brittanica has laid off most of its 1000 door-to-door salesmen and Brockhaus is posting all 200,000 of their scholarly articles on line, hoping to churn a small profit from ad revenue. These are dinosaur models of information storage, production and distribution, but that doesn't mean we can't love them and miss them. The market system is a brutal system of coordination, providing incentives to engage in welfare-enhancing activities from which society benefits, but during which obsolete ways of life are scratched out like some stupid little scab that only reminds us of something we used to do. Joseph Schumpeter had a great name for it - "creative destruction." The paper encyclopedia is, sadly, one of the more recent casualties in that creative process.

Nevertheless, my children will not know what they missed. They will only know that if you go to Wikipedia, you can get lost in a world of hyperlinked articles on anything and everything. The consumer surplus generated by the Internet is huge - astronomical even. But we can still admit to ourselves that we miss some of the old things, even if we're ultimately able to believe what's replaced them is better. Or even if we can't.