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JAMES CARROLL

An era, shelved

The end of Encyclopaedia Britannica’s print edition is a monumental marker of change

By James Carroll

 |  Globe Columnist  

  March 19, 2012

Thomas Jefferson was a 25-year-old lawyer when the Encyclopaedia Britannica began publishing its volumes, and the enterprise has continued until now. The enterprise was always both a collection of information-filled books and a symbol of something transcending the books. So Britannica’s passage into an Internet-only afterlife is more than an epochal moment in publishing history; it also epitomizes a deeper change in how and why we come to know things.

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