Tuesday, March 13, 2012

End Of An Era For Britannica


It was just announced that the Britannica (which was started in 1768), will cease printing traditional paper encyclopedias. In another sign that the printed page is being extinguished as a profit making enterprise, Britannica said they would concentrate on selling their data bases to others, and on “apps” for iPads and other tablet computers.

1.      Tablets are racing into the classrooms of America in lieu of books
2.      Universities are switching from printed books to electronic books in their libraries.

Example : the new library in the “about to be built” new facility for the University of South Carolina Moore School of Business is supposed to be radically different from the existing one.  The new one will have nearly all electronic books instead of paper ones (the library looks like a small room on the blueprints I saw)

Distributed Processing:  this is an old term, that is relevant again.  As the books go electronic, where a student reads them won’t matter as it did in the past.  So a library table and chair is no longer essential. The work (or in this case the information) is distributed to the person, the person doesn’t go to the information location.

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