Brockhaus Encyclopedia, 21st edition

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Audio installation for the presentation of the 21st edition of the Brockhaus Encyclopedia in the courtyard of the Frankfurt Book Fair 2005

The 21st edition of the Brockhaus Encyclopedia is a general encyclopedia in 30 volumes, which covers around 300,000 keywords on around 24,500 pages, around 40,000 images and a sound archive with around 4,000 audio samples (total playing time of around 70 hours). It was edited and maintained by the Bibliographisches Institut & FA Brockhaus . The print version was published in 2005 and 2006, a version with a USB stick and two DVDs was delivered in 2005, and the online version was updated until 2010.

Editing and edition

After the 20th edition, which appeared from 1996 to 1999, and whose sales figures did not meet the publisher's expectations, dpa reported in May 2001:

"Despite the sales problems with the encyclopedia, the publisher wants to stick to its flagship: A new edition is planned for the company's 200th anniversary in 2005."

- dpa-AFX from May 28, 2001

The project started in June 2003, in autumn 2004 the texts of the 20th edition were removed from the company's own portal xipolis.net . For a limited period up to the end of 2005, 29 additional editors were hired, who, under the direction of Annette Zwahr in Leipzig, wrote the articles themselves or gave orders to external authors. According to the publisher, each editor managed 8,000 headwords. The layout was created using the PageOne typesetting system , and the internal Medea image database was available to the editorial team to coordinate the images required. The texts were created by the editorial staff using the Reda program, which manages the texts in SGML syntax.

Print edition

On October 19, 2005, the first six volumes were presented at the Frankfurt Book Fair . It was the last Brockhaus edition supervised by the Bibliographisches Institut and the last Brockhaus edition ever. While the earlier editions were published over several years (the 19th edition in a period of nine years, the 20th edition in a period of four years), the 21st edition appeared within twelve months:

The presentation fulfilled the expectations of a work that could be used for many decades. The print edition included two audio DVDs, one for PCs and the other for DVD players.

For the years 2006, 2007 and 2008 there were annual volumes (Brockhaus Encyclopedia Yearbooks). The Weltbild Verlag offered on the Internet to a 2009 revised and updated 21st edition.

USB dongle and DVDs

An electronic version appeared with the first six volumes (Brockhaus Enzyklopädie Digital, ISBN 3-7653-4131-2 ) for Windows 2000 and Windows XP . A complicated copy protection procedure was used. The information (text) is contained on a very elaborately designed USB stick with a capacity of one gigabyte, which also functions as a dongle . The 13 GB data on the two DVDs can be copied to the hard drive, but it can only be used with the stick inserted. If the stick is defective or lost, the data can no longer be used. Installation and use were complicated and prone to failure. However, if the internet access and dongle worked, the encyclopedia content on the hard drive could be updated monthly.

Online offer

Until 2010, buyers of the encyclopedia were also promised access to the Brockhaus website www.brockhaus-enzyklopaedie.de . The publisher stated that it would have around 40 editors permanently update the content there until 2010. The electronic offers have been online since October 1, 2005. According to Marion Winkenbach, Publishing Director for General Lexica, updates should be incorporated every two weeks. In the case of events of greater significance (such as the election of the Pope ), changes should be online after 24 hours. For March 2008, B. I. & F. A. Brockhaus announced that they wanted to put the Brockhaus Encyclopedia free of charge (financed by advertising) online. At the Frankfurt Book Fair in September 2008, however, the company spokesman told the Börsenblatt : “The start has been postponed indefinitely” ( Klaus Holoch ). This page was never made available for free and has not been active since January 7, 2015.

Competition with Wikipedia

Shortly before the market launch of the digital lexicon, in August 2005, the press spokesman for Brockhaus Holoch affronted the poor quality of the free encyclopedia Wikipedia in an interview with Deutschlandradio Kultur : “The only thing that bothers me is that people pretend to do so [Wikipedia] is a reliable lexicon, and it is by no means. "Brockhaus, on the other hand, relies on" quality, on specialist editors, on specialist authors and we have a system that absolutely ensures this quality and this reliability and that everyone who comes from Brockhaus cited, can really be sure that what he is quoting is correct. ”However, there were soon comparisons, for example by the“ Scientific Information Service Cologne ”, which compared 50 randomly selected articles with regard to correctness, completeness, topicality and comprehensibility. Overall, Wikipedia was victorious, especially in the “Topicality” category. Brockhaus had the upper hand in terms of intelligibility.

At that time the Encyclopædia Britannica had already radically changed its business model and sold its first CD versions. Wikipedia, on the other hand, was far from being a competitor in terms of quality and reliability, but it was easily accessible and opened up new areas of special knowledge from current technology, market offers, and local history. The calculation that a comparatively small group of buyers could finance a German encyclopedia with paid specialist authors and specialist editors, however, did not work out under these conditions.

Financial aspects

The Bibliographisches Institut and F. A. Brockhaus stated that they had invested 20 million euros for the new edition. For the advertising campaign under the slogan “Whoever knows more, can move more”, four million euros were made available by the agency GBK Heye in Munich. Advertising media included Marcel Reich-Ranicki and Otto Sander . In production, the license costs for images exceeded the costs for text creation for the first time.

The printed version was sold in Germany until the end of March 2006 for a prepayment price of 2397 euros, the electronic version for 1489 euros. From April 2006 the 30 volumes cost 2490 euros and in December 2011 even 2820 euros. The prices in Austria and Switzerland were comparable.

Further development

Compared to the journal Buchreport , the publisher stated that it wanted to sell 20,000 copies of the encyclopedia by autumn 2006 and 50,000 in the medium term. In February 2008 the publisher had to admit that the target of 20,000 copies sold was unattainable in view of the strong online competition. "The 21st edition of the encyclopedia was probably the last - from now on everything will take place online." ( Klaus Holoch )

The Arvato subsidiary, Wissenmedia GmbH, took over the Brockhaus brand on February 1, 2009 and in 2014 stopped selling the printed Brockhaus encyclopedia. In 2015 the publisher of the Swedish National Encyclopedia (NE Nationalencyklopædin AG) took over the rights to the Brockhaus brand. Its German subsidiary NE GmbH has been developing and marketing the online edition of the Brockhaus Encyclopedia since then.

literature

  • Thomas Keiderling (Ed.): FA Brockhaus 1905-2005. Brockhaus, Leipzig 2005, ISBN 3-7653-0284-8 .
  • Hermann Heckmann: A major printed attack in the age of the Internet . In: Book report June 2005.
  • Wolfgang Piereth: Collective review: digital lexica . In: sehepunkte 6 (2006), No. 4 (April 15, 2006).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Bertelsmann takes over Brockhaus. In: tagesspiegel.de. December 17, 2008, accessed December 29, 2017 .
  2. ↑ Nicole Hoehne: Brockhaus saddles. In: Boersenblatt.net. September 24, 2008, accessed December 29, 2017 .
  3. ↑ Brockhaus-Enzyklopaedie.de website . Retrieved December 29, 2017 .
  4. ↑ The presentation follows the Munich historian Wolfgang Piereth: Review of Brockhaus Enzyklopädie Digital. In: sehepunkte 6 (2006), No. 4 (April 15, 2006). http://www.sehepunkte.de/2006/04/10839.html Online .
  5. ↑ Britta Widmann: Wikipedia is better than Brockhaus. In: ZDNet. December 5, 2007, accessed December 29, 2017 .
  6. ↑ Thorsten Kleinz: Goodbye gold edging. In: Zeit Online. February 7, 2008, accessed December 29, 2017 .
  7. ^ André Kramer: Final end for printed Brockhaus. In: Heise.de. August 17, 2014, accessed December 29, 2017 .
  8. ^ The Brockhaus editorial team. In: Brockhaus.de. Retrieved December 29, 2017 .
  9. ↑ About Brockhaus. In: Brockhaus.de. Retrieved December 29, 2017 .