On October 1st 1808, young book merchant Friedrich Arnold Brockhaus bought all rights to publish the „Conversations-Lexicon“. The Brockhaus encyclopedia became a backbone of German education and culture, a national symbol like Goethe’s „Faust“ or Beethoven’s 9th symphonie. For almost two centuries the fine leather spines of the Brockhaus editions with their golden characters were a must in the living room shelves of the German bourgeoisie. This week Brockhaus CEO Ulrich Granseyer announced that after more than 200 years the 21st printed edition was the last. Instead the complete Brockhaus (30 volumes, 24.500 pages, 300.000 entries, price of 2.670 Euro) will be available online and for free by April the 15th. „We had to accept that people are searching on the Internet“, Granseyer explained the dramatic step.
Brockhaus survived wars, revolutions and the iron curtain. In 1943 during the Secod World War allied bombs destroyed the headquartes in Leipzig. Ten years later East German communists seized Brockhaus. For 40 years East and West Germans had their own Brockhaus – the capitalst one published in Mannheim, the communist one published in Leipzig. Brockhaus survived it all. Now it had to surrender to the web and to wikipedia.
As a knowledge aggregator and provider the web is faster, more convenient, more interactive and – of course – more visual than print.The change of strategy comes late. The Encycloaedia Britannica was the first to accept the fact, that there is no future for this type of a printed knowledge base.
Bertelsmann, largest Brockhaus competitor in the German market, decided to go a different way. The day Brockhaus announced the end of the printed edition Bertelsmann‘s encyclopedia subdivision Wissen Media launched Spiegel.Wissen, a knowledge portal that combines the lexical data from Bertelsmann with articles from Spiegel archive and – yes – Wikipedia. Only one day later a beta version of Chroniknet went online, a picture portal, dedicated to collect the private picture stock of Germans and compile an archive of visual private history.
For it‘s portal Brockhaus will offer up to four million pictures they licensed from photo agencies. The portal will also contain permanentely updated info graphic content. The business model? Brockhaus hopes for sufficient ad revenue. But media planners are quite sceptical, whether Brockhaus can generate enough reach to become an attractive place for big brands.
Talking about the future of traditional media Brockhaus rises one alarming question:Who’s next?
3 comments:
oko said...
You wrote "The Encycloaedia Britannica was the first to accept the fact, that there is no future for this type of a printed knowledge base". Well, really?
According to the Wikipedia-Entry on the Britannica an updated print-edition was published as recently as last year.
14 February 2008 17:35
You're right. But the Britannica was the first of the leading encyclopaedias to announce something like a online first strategy, opening large portions of it's content to free web access.
Brockhaus made some ambitious experiments with xipolis.net. But never generated enough reach and public awareness.
I hear that they are now planning to team up with the weekly "Die Zeit" and may be other high class publications. Seems to be a promising survival strategy for Brockhaus online.
Interesting. Media-brands like "Spiegel" and "Zeit" are teaming up with encyclopedias on the web. "Old" and "new" media mixing up. Leaving behind those poor old-media guys who simply don't get it (i.e. 90+ percent of newsroom-inhabitants).
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