It costs nothing to use but it shoved the venerable Encyclopedia Britannica into moldy library stacks.

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When it gives, it sounds like a volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica has hit the concrete-slab floor.

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From a marketing perspective they were the thin edge of the sales sword for brands like Encyclopedia Britannica, Avon, and Fuller Brushes.

FORBES: A Foot in the Door No More

Knowledge, which used to be available only to the elite classes through books such as the Encyclopedia Britannica, is today abundant and free.

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Steering clear of Northwestern University's tweedy English department, he graduated in 1937 in anthropology and sociology and later went to work for the Encyclopedia Britannica.

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Like phone books, we used to have immutable facts all compiled in Encyclopedia Britannica: 9 planets in our solar system, the Soviet Union, and avoid alcohol.

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Entering a strange region, he would grapple with its history, rifling through the Encyclopedia Britannica and Meyers Konversationslexicon to trace the movements of tribes and the collision of cultures, producing in his books whole page-lists of Klephts and Armatoles, Kroumides and Koniarides, Phanariots of the Sublime Porte and boyars of Moldowallachia, until his readers swooned.

ECONOMIST: Paddy Leigh Fermor