Encyclopaedia Britannica

I have the ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1875). And I also have the eleventh edition (1911, with 1922 sup­ple­ment), which I prefer for its greater coverage, its thin paper and its leather binding. I don’t begrudge the four-and-a-half metres of shelving they occupy. It’s handy to be able to look up Primitive Methodist, or Poughkeepsie, or Piranesi in these time capsules.

You can get the same information — though not the pleasure of paper and binding — from a website. The unnamed authors of this site have scanned and OCRed the huge 1911 text. The pre­sen­ta­tion is rough, the navigation is basic, but the words are there. I hope that one day all this text can find its way into a hy­per­text database, like the modern Britannica.

Update, August 2013: The 1911encyclopedia.org website has gone, superseded by the ongoing Project Gutenberg efforts to produce accurate versions of the work in various digital formats​—​see the links at the bottom of this wikipedia page.