E.R.: When you look back over the last 30 years, what kinds of changes have you seen since you joined Encyclopaedia Britannica?
McHenry: Well, it was a different world back then. I started in the editorial department as a proofreader trainee, and I'm sure that I missed a lot of what was going on because it was all so new to me. We were still in the hot metal era, and one of the first things I learned was patience in those terrible times when we would send manuscripts or corrected galleys back to the typesetter and wait and wait and wait for the next stage to come. When we got to the end of a schedule those waiting times became very, very critical - to the point that people's health sometimes suffered. Certainly their emotional health suffered when we had late corrections on our Yearbook, which seemed bound to happen every year, simply because we were trying to cover an entire calendar year and then get the book out as quickly as possible afterwards. So when there was a coup in Nigeria on December 31st, it meant a lot of worry.
But the funny thing is that, although the technology has changed so enormously that someone who last saw publishing in 1967 would hardly recognize what we're doing now, the change in technology hasn't changed the nature of our work very much. It's a little bit like the promise of the paperless office when we first started using office automation and we were told that "in a few years you will hardly see a piece of paper on anyone's desk." Well, as we know, that didn't work out. In fact, work expanded to fill the capabilities, just like information seems to expand to fill the channels.
E.R.: What about the changes in the marketing of encyclopedias? The day of the door-to-door salesman seems to be over now.
McHENRY: Yes, although I know our marketing people are a little sensitive on the point that Britannica never did door-to-door sales.
E.R.: No?
McHENRY: Never did door-to-door sales in the sense of cold-call, knock on the door and see if somebody would like to talk about encyclopedias. Our direct selling was always done in response to leads. So there was always some prior indication of interest on the part of the prospects, whether they sent back a mail-in card or called a telephone number they'd seen in an advertisement or something like that.
E.R.: So what is the status of encyclopedias in the age of the Internet?
McHENRY: Well, that's a very live question. I think what we've seen in last five or six years is that the role of the print encyclopedia has changed dramatically. The print encyclopedia used to be the encyclopedia. When you said "the encyclopedia," you meant that set of books on the shelf. Now, as we have taken some pains to learn (and as we have to remind ourselves from time to time the idea is still quite new), "the encyclopedia" means the content of our database. It exists in one place and one place only, and our work as editors, if you will, is the care and feeding of that database. And from that database we are able to realize a variety of products in different media. One is a set of books, which still has a role to play - though a somewhat reduced and quite different one. A second is an online information service - which we don't even associate the name encyclopedia with - we call it Britannica Online (not Encyclopaedia Britannica Online). A third is a CD, which is in most respects similar to the online service. And in the future we expect there will be yet other products, more or less encyclopedic in nature.
E.R.: What does the revenue stream look like, in terms of percentages, between CDs and paper and the Internet?
McHENRY: I couldn't give you a meaningful response to that because it is so enormously in flux. The rate of change is astonishing and there are a variety of reasons for that. Of course, eliminating direct sales changed everything overnight - literally. That was followed quickly by very significant changes in our price structure. We are now in a position of seeking out direct marketing opportunities for all of these products and, quite frankly, experimenting with both channels and prices in an attempt to find the best ways to get our products in the forms that are wanted to the people who want them. And it's very much up in the air right now; it's not at all clear how it's all going to work out. I think we are all of the opinion that those three product lines - the books, the CD and online - will all survive for some time and it's just a question of working hard to find the right channels to get them to the appropriate segments of the market. Britannica Online, although it's the newest of these forms, is in some ways the least problematic marketing challenge for us, in that we know pretty well how to get to the people who are online, since they effectively define themselves by being there and making themselves simultaneously available.
E.R.: You mention pricing structure. How has that changed, and what is your current strategy?
McHENRY: Just to give the most vivid possible example, when our CD product, BCD 1.0, came out, it was the all-text, no graphics product. We had just at that point managed to squeeze all of the text onto a single CD, and we made it available through our direct sales channel at $1595, the same price as the print set, and we actually sold some. The current version still has all of the text in addition to a fair number of graphics, and is selling for $299. That's an enormous difference. The price of the print set - which has bounced up and down around a median value of about $1500 over the years - is now $995.
E.R.: You have received a certain amount of criticism for over-emphasizing text. How do you feel about that?
McHENRY: We sometimes joke here that in the age of multimedia, the text has just become the mayonnaise on the sandwich. I have read from time to time what strike me as pretty silly claims to the effect that - oh, let's say Grolier - has "redefined what the encyclopedia is, redefined the reference product." That is just plain silly. Text happens to be the primary medium for the conveying of information and knowledge. It is not the sole medium but it is the primary medium that we all use every day. And it never ceases to amaze me to hear someone deliver an eloquent paragraph of spoken text to argue that multimedia is somehow more significant than text. They argue with words, they don't show you pictures to make that point. They have to explain it in somewhat elaborate detail, and yet they seem oblivious to the internal contradiction there.
What we are trying to do at Britannica is to try to use the various media that have now become available to us in order to achieve the same ends that have always motivated our work. That is, we want to convey a certain body of knowledge to interested learners and we always use the tools at hand. When the tools at hand were steel-cut engravings or woodcuts, those were the tools used in supplement to text. And when color printing became available we used that. Now, at least with Britannica Online and on CD, we have the opportunity to use video and animation and new media, and we are working to do that. We have several articles under revision right now and we are revising them simultaneously for print and for these other channels. And of course they will look quite different in those various media.
E.R.: Encyclopedias in general and probably Encyclopaedia Britannica in particular are thought of as the voice of authority, whereas the Internet is sometimes thought of as the voice of anarchy. Do you see hope for encyclopedias as the anarchic voice of the Internet continues to hold sway?
McHENRY: Well, it's my observation - with regard not just to the Internet, but more generally (having watched children grow up) - that anarchy is something the pleasure of which grows old rather quickly. It's heady, it's exciting for awhile, but soon people begin to look for some sort of structure, some sort of order. I'm persuaded that it's deeply imbedded in our nature to look for a pattern in things, order, structure; and that's what we ordinarily think of as knowledge. Knowledge is organization; it's a set of factual statements organized so as to allow some meaning to emerge from that selection of facts.
When we first began working on the online version of Britannica, in late '92 and early '93, many of us were introduced to the Internet for the first time. And I began following one of the Usenet groups that arose around the notion of creating an encyclopedia right on the Internet. Since this was before the World Wide Web was very well-known, the project was going to be an all-text affair, and was going to be something that was created by the people. And as a veteran of 1968, much of what I was reading in these exchanges, rang sort of familiar. You know, it was kind of "Power to the People! - Encyclopedia to the People! Everyone write his own article and submit it and we'll put it up!" And there was an enormous and quite passionate debate among a small group of people about creating this "interpedia," as they called it. And I must say, for some people here at Britannica there was real concern about it, but I continued to counsel them, "Don't worry about it; this is going to fall apart very quickly - in fact, it will fall apart just as soon as they actually try to accomplish something, to move beyond the debate stage and try to do something." And, sure enough, in a matter of four or five months, the project completely fell apart, because I think of a dawning realization that, to put it crassly, the product would be worth exactly what they paid for it: nothing.
E.R.: Okay, it fell apart certainly as a project. Did it fall apart as an idea? In discussions about the Internet, there is still a lot of favor given to words like discussion, chat, collaboration.
McHENRY: Oh, yes. And I don't mean to denigrate those ideas as ideas. But one of the catch phrases I hear nowadays is "Information wants to be free" - which, apart from being a pathetic fallacy, is also meaningless, as far as I can make out. It seems to me we hear that sort of sentiment mainly from people who, either because they are grad students or because they are working in an MIS department someplace, have unlimited free computer access provided to them on somebody else's machine, and have a fairly dim idea of how the economy works.
E.R.: Let's go back to the general question of change. Have you seen any change in scholarship over the years?
McHENRY: That's tough. I think we are certainly seeing a change lately, and I think in large part it's instigated by electronic media and the rise of electronic journalism in particular. And it's by no means at this point a revolution, but there are a number of strands coming together, one being the large and rapidly rising subscription costs for serious journals, which is running into, if not shrinking, the fairly static periodicals budgets in libraries in universities and in other institutions all over. And of course there's the issue of whether it is practical to have a refereed journal online - and if it isn't refereed "does it count for my academic tenure track?" So it's a somewhat unformed, inchoate kind of situation now, but I think there are changes visible. For example, now we are beginning to hear from some of our contributors: "Well, wouldn't we like to make this a Web document right away and wouldn't we like to include some animation or what have you?" So clearly, at least among some scholars, they are beginning to incorporate these new tools into their thinking, just as we are incorporating them into ours.
E.R.: Does Britannica get fan mail?
McHENRY: We've always gotten fan mail, if you permit me to use the term very loosely. We've always gotten a lot of mail, in any case. We have a small group whose job it is to deal with that portion of our mail that concerns itself with editorial matters - the content of our products. You won't be surprised to hear that when people have to actually take the time to sit down and write us a letter, then address an envelope, find a stamp and decide to spend a stamp on us, one of the most effective motivators for that much effort is often some degree of irritation because they feel they've found some error or omission. So traditionally the large bulk of the mail that we got offered criticism, usually quite polite, but criticism of one sort or another. When Britannica Online became available and particularly when it became available in a consumer market, as anticipated we began to receive e-mail. And early on, as I recall, about 25-40 percent of the comments we received were complimentary - which was just astonishing, just wonderful, very gratifying. Now, as things have settled a bit, and as the so-called early adopters have gotten used to having Britannica available online, the distribution of comments being offered us has settled down into something like a familiar pattern - with the exception that we get a fair number of inquiries as to when we are going to add more pictures. They always think of something that we don't have a picture of!
E.R.: What about other kinds of expectations? Is there increasing pressure in the electronic age to try to stay up-to-the-minute?
McHENRY: Yes, there is, and that has presented us with the need to be very, very clear in our minds where our job leaves off and the daily newspaper takes up - because we are not a newspaper and have no ambitions to become a newspaper; although I tend to think of it as a species of journalism, it is certainly not daily journalism. Our job is to provide a more substantive, a more matured, a more reflective summary of a pattern of events, rather than merely to report the last one that happened. So we have established a rule-of-thumb as to how we will decide what to update immediately (and we do have the capacity to add certain kinds of updated materials on a daily basis) and what we will leave alone and allow to come to maturity before we venture to try to summarize it.
E.R.: What is that rule-of-thumb?
McHENRY: Roughly this: if some event in the world renders a statement in Britannica actually false - whether through discovery or just through the evolution of time, something that was the case is no longer the case - then we look very hard at that with an eye to immediate revision in some way. However, if the evolution of events merely renders our account incomplete - that is, not fully up to yesterday - then in most cases we will leave it alone.
E.R.: For example, a death?
McHENRY: A death renders what we say false, in that we have an open death date which implies - if it doesn't say explicitly - that the person is alive. When that is no longer the case, we will write in and fix it. And we can do similar things with elections. Who is the President of the United States? Well, the answer is one thing one day and something else the next day, and so we can make that kind of change. When Cal Ripken Jr. broke Lou Gehrig's consecutive games record - of course we saw that one coming and so we could and we did go right in and make the appropriate change in the Lou Gehrig biography, where it said that his record had never been broken, and suddenly that statement was no longer true.
E.R.: What's an example of when you would leave something alone?
McHENRY: Well, any unfolding story. I think people do not - I certainly hope they do not; they certainly shouldn't - expect a reference source to reflect a part of an unfolding story. And of course that begs the question, because isn't everything from some perspective an unfolding story? Well, that's true, but the contrast between daily journalism and what we do is fairly clear in a sense like that. So when Prime Minister Rabin was assassinated, we noted that fact immediately. The late unrest in Jerusalem and the negotiations underway now, we will leave alone until we see some sort of closure, some narrative tidiness that provides us with a punctuation point at which we can say, okay, and then over this period of time such-and-such sorts of things happened.
E.R.: What's in the future for Encyclopaedia Britannica?
McHENRY: What I hope I see - certainly what we have in mind building towards - is bringing Britannica to something like the center of people's interaction with the World Wide Web or whatever may succeed it as the world information system. We won't be able to do that for everybody, because there are too many different kinds of people with different kinds of needs - but we'll be able to do it for that portion of the populace who are our natural audience anyway (what we generally characterize as "the curious and intelligent laymen"). For those people who are using this wonderful new information system as a serious tool to find out things, who want to know about things and use the new technologies as the way to accomplish that goal, I see us positioning ourselves as their preferred port of entry or gateway to the good part of what's out there, available on the Net. We have a number of initiatives underway to realize that vision. I think a lot of things will help us - our brand name, our reputation, our tradition, our methods and our standards.
Robert McHenry is editor-in-chief of The Encyclopaedia Britannica and served as a key architect of the Britannica Online reference service. McHenry's career with the Britannica enterprise spans some 30 years, during which he held a number of key positions, including the editorship of the Britannica Roundtable magazine and numerous works of biographical reference.