After 244 years in print, Encyclopaedia Britannica is going "completely digital".
In yet another sign of the growing dominance of the digital publishing market, the oldest English-language encyclopaedia still being produced will no longer publish printed editions.
Encyclopaedia Britannica has been in continuous print since it was first published in Edinburgh in Scotland in 1768.
"The end of the print set is something we've foreseen for some time," Jorge Cauz, president of Encyclopaedia Britannica, said in a statement.
"It's the latest step in our evolution from the print publisher we were, to the creator of digital learning products we are today."
The flagship, 32-volume printed edition, available every two years, was sold for $1400 (€1071).
The pricey gold-lettered books, once sold by a "fleet" of door to door salesmen, were not only viewed as an informative tool, but as a luxury item and even a status symbol.
The "coolly authoritative" reference books were coveted as a "goalpost for an aspirational middle class" who often paid for the multivolume sets in instalments in the 1950's and 1960s, the New York Times wrote in glowing tribute to the end of era.
Sales peaked in 1990 when 120,000 sets were sold in the United States and dropped off precipitously as the Internet became the reference of choice for most Americans, with the huge growth of online reference site Wikipedia.
Only 8,000 of the 12,000 collections printed for the 2010 edition were sold.
Encyclopaedia Britannica offered its first digital edition in 1981 for LexisNexis users, published the first multi-media CD in 1989 and the first posted to the internet in 1994. It also expanded into the school curriculum market.
The online version, which offers some services for free and charges an annual fee for enhanced content, attracts an audience of 100 million people worldwide, according to the company.
"Britannica was one of the first company's to really feel the full impact of technology, maybe twenty years ago, and we have been adapting to it, though it is very difficult at times," the president of Encyclopaedia Britannica told Reuters.
As to whether print editions of books will be viable products in the future, Mr Cauz predicted, "print may not completely vanish from the market, but I think it is going to be increasingly less important. Many publications will never have a print analog and will only be printed on digital formats."
