ABSTRACT
Due to declining sales of Britannica’s main print products, the need to become a digital publisher, in part or whole, had been clear to the company several years before I arrived, though how fast the company would become primarily a digital publisher and when it would produce its last set of printed books was not a fixed point on the calendar. There had been many plans on how and when to become fully digital, some of which are still in place today, as well as several false starts. But it became evident to all of us in management more than a dozen years ago that Britannica’s future was not going to depend on being a print-based publisher of general and specialized encyclopedias, even though that is precisely the type of publications the company has been known for, and what the brand predominately still stands for, in the minds of many.
