Encyclopedia Britannica Inc Essay Example for Free

Encyclopedia Britannica Inc EssayBy the time Britannicas top management decided to stop producing bound sets of the iconic encyclopedia, the go with had made sweeping changes to put itself at the forefront of the online education market.ne year ago, my announcement that Encyclopdia Britannica would cease producing bound volumes sent ripples through the media world. Despite the coarse migration of information from ink and paper to bits and screens, it seemed remarkable that a set of books published for almost a quarter of a millennium would go out of print. however in our Chicago offices this wasnt an occasion to mourn.In fact, our employees held a party the solar day of the announcement, celebrating the fact that Britannica was still a growing and viable company.They ate the print setin the form of a cake that pictured the 32-volume, 129-pound encyclopedia. They displayed 244 silver balloonsone for each year the encyclopedia had been in print. They toasted the departure of an aged friend with champagne and the dawning of a new era with determination.We had no need for a wake because we werent grieving. We had k at presentn for or so time that this day was coming. Given how little revenue the print set generated, and given that we had long ago shifted to a digital-first editorial process, the bound volumes had become a distraction and a chore to put together. They could no longer hold the vast amount of information our March 2013Harvard Business Review2 This article is made operational to you with compliments of Jorge Cauz. Further posting, copying or distributing is copyright infringement.How I Did ItBritannica Then and Nowcustomers demanded or be kept as up-todate as todays users expect. The reaction to our announcement was interesting and varied. Some people were shocked. On Twitter, one person wrote, Im sorry I was unfaithful to you, Encyclopedia Britannica, Wikipedia was on the nose there, and convenient, it meant nothing. Please, come backOf course, we didnt need to come back, because we hadnt gone away and werent about to. But although most people seemed to know what was happening, some misunderstood. Commentators intimated that we had yielded to the internet. In fact, the internet enabled us to reinvent ourselves and open new channels of business. Reports cited Wikipedia as a disruptive force. In fact, Wikipedia helped us sharpen our business strategy. Our subject area model was dismissed as vintage, but it is actually anything but We update our content continually, with community input, reaching tens of millions of people every dayand they pay for it.I relished the irony. If you relied on free, gossipy online channels to understand why we were ending the print edition, you got what you paid for some jokes, some inaccurate observations about the state of our business, and maybe a 20% chance of seeing Encyclopdia Britannica spelled correctly. You may not have learned that by the time we stopped publishing the print se t, its sales represented single about 1% of our business, that we have an increasingly significant presence in the K12 digital learning space, and that were as profitable now as weve ever been.Whatever ripples the announcement may have made, from a business perspective the decision itself was a nonevent. It was just the final phase of a carefully planned strategic transition that had been 35 years in the making.