The Encyclopaedia Britannica people have come up with a novel way of promoting their material: anyone who is a web publisher or blogger can get a free account to use their encyclopaedia online and can post links to articles that will work for their readers.
Which is interesting, I think, from a marketing point of view, and welcome for those times when you just don’t want to rely on Wikipedia on some subject. I’ve signed up, if only because I want to have access to the Britannica. I’d be slightly more excited about it if I didn’t find the implementation of their website so irritating.
It’s all javascripty and dynamic, which means it’s constantly loading things in different places and the page seems to be jumping around all the time. It isn’t enormously fast and, just as much of a problem, it’s very visually distracting. If there was ever something where you would want clean, simple and unobtrusive, it’s a reference work: I want to be able to jump in and jump out, and find the information I’m looking for quickly.
It actually looks much better if you disable javascript, and I daresay there are ways of blocking javascript selectively on particular sites, but I’m not going to do that. Anyway, here’s a couple of links just to give you the general idea; let me know if they’re not working: Gothic Revival, John Milton, subatomic particle.
» Shot of the 1911 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica posted to Flickr by Stewart; used under a CC by licence.
3 Comments
OMG! They’re on Twitter!
Thanks for the link, Harry. I’ll sign up.
I don’t know what you mena by “working” – when I click these links, they want me to “activate my free trial” before they’ll let my read farther than the first sentence.
Really? I guess that either means it’s not working or that they have really implemented it stupidly. I suspect it’s the latter.
I do have some sympathy; their business model which survived for almost 250 years must have completely disintegrated in the face of Wikipedia and Google. I don’t know how I’d go about adapting to the internet age if I was them; but nothing I’ve encountered so far suggests they’ve found the right answers.