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Free Britannica for bloggers! (and widgets too)

April 19, 2008
Bloggers and other regular Web publisher folks can now register for free access to the full content of Britannica Online through Britannica WebShare.

The Britannica folks explain their offer to a product that would normally cost $70 a year for individual subscribers.

Britannica covers a wide range of topics with thousands of articles and multimedia features. They’re relevant and useful, and we’d like more people to be able to take advantage of them. You get complimentary access to the Encyclopedia Britannica online and, if you like, an easy way to give your readers background on the topics you write about with links to complete Britannica articles.

This access to background information comes in the form of widgets.  Yesterday Britannica also announced the arrival of Britannica Widgets:

with them you can instantly post an entire cluster of related Encyclopaedia Britannica articles on your blog or Web site.  Just follow the instructions and copy and paste the several lines of code associated with each widget as html into the appropriate place on your site.  Any readers who click on a link will get the entire Britannica article on the subject, even if access to the article normally requires a subscription.  Really. Try it.

So let’s say you have a site about philosophy, or astronomy, or basketball.  Stick one of the widgets below on your site and your readers will instantly have access to Britannica’s coverage of the subject.  

Britannica is doing a lot of things right - a relatively small staff of a hundred or so editors manages 4,000 unpaid (I believe) contributors who are recognized experts in their field. But, like the music labels, they still somehow feel as though people should pay to consume their content. And that means search engines can’t index their content. And that means they don’t exist.

Instead of going free and opening up to all, they’re using the new program to simply price discriminate. Give people who may link to the site free access. Everyone else has to pay. So in effect they’re aiming to be half pregnant - they want the benefits of web linking but don’t want to give up the subscription fees from the fools who continue to pay them.

Where do I stand? 

In the middle as usual.  I love that I can (or may be able to--I just registered myself) access and share an encyclopedia I've found so useful and reliable for so many years, as well as the free materials I also love to use and share.  And though I am a huge fan of the Wikipedia model of knowledge building and sharing, I am also used to paying for and willing to subscribe to content I value. 

In my world, information is a commodity.

If I did not purchase content for our library, those publishers I respect the most would not be able to continue to publish the content my leaners most need. 

I am however hoping that Britannica will define blogger and Web publisher broadly enough to include most blogging teachers, as well as learners.

Posted by Joyce Valenza Ph.D on April 19, 2008 | Comments (0)