Start Writing the Eulogies for Print Encyclopedias

IT has never been easier to read up on a favorite topic, whether it’s an obscure philosophy, a tiny insect or an overexposed pop star. Just don’t count on being able to thumb through the printed pages of an encyclopedia to do it.

A series of announcements from publishers across the globe in the last few weeks suggests that the long migration to the Internet has picked up pace, and that ahead of other books, magazines and even newspapers, the classic multivolume encyclopedia is well on its way to becoming the first casualty in the end of print...

I never trusted the Encyclopedias. We had a set from about 1948 and when I was in High School and the geography section was a complete bust. The section on Africa not accurate and out of date every fifteen minutes. The records section was always out of date too...medicine was out of date...basically as the thing was being printed it was obsolete. It looked nice on the shelf...Richards I believe...

“May I ask which company you worked for?”

I don’t remember which books they were in Texas, I think it may have been Grolier in Missouri.

Different companies would court us to sell their books, I don’t know if any one actually had a dedicated sales force of their own, my experience was that we were guns for hire.

“So you would simply spend most of the 55-minutes showing them what a great encyclopedia the Britannica was (after all it sells itself) and towards the end of the presentation, mention that for the price of a couple of cups of coffee a day, they can have ten years of updates and oh, by the way, if you agree to that, I’ll throw this entire set of encyclopedias in for free! “

You knock on a hundred doors to tell ten people that you are doing marketing research, three households let you present them, and you close one of them for your nights pay.

Those were the coarse numbers for rookies and mediocre salesmen.

The presentation is about seeking families that are interested in books, that will write a letter endorsing the encyclopedias, the presentation consisted of beautiful, large, full color presentation sheets, a steady monologue including getting a number of affirmative responses from the customer, closing with the updating services, and easy payments.

It is a beautiful experience to watch, my brother used to ask me to do it for him over and over and we would marvel at the perfection of every motion and every word of the script.

By the way, I learned that salesmen are huge suckers, at first I was nervous when I found out that the man I was pitching was a high powered successful salesman, but I learned to just stay on script, and you would have them in the palm of your hand.

We got the complete EB from my grandparents - it must have been quite out of date cause when we got the EB we got about as many of the annual updates.

As a grade school student of junior high school student you had to write a “report” on topic X and Y - which inevitably consisted of taking the EB article and “putting it in your own words”. As time went on those types of assignmnets went away as did I think the trips to the EB shelf.

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