There is no source of reference remotely as authoritative as Encyclopaedia Britannica. There is no brand as venerable and as veteran as this mammoth labour of knowledge and ideas established in 1768. There is no better value for money. And, after a few sputters and bugs, it now comes in all shapes and sizes, including two CD-ROM versions (standard and deluxe) and an appealing and reader-friendly web site. So, why does it always appear to be on brink of extinction?

The Britannica provides for an interesting study of changing fortunes (and formats) of vendors of reference. As late as a decade ago, it was still selling in a leather-imitation bound set of 32 volumes. As print encyclopaedias went, it was a daring innovator and a pioneer of hyperlinked-like textual design. It sported a subject index, a lexical part and an alphabetically arranged series of in-depth essays authored by best in every field of human erudition.

When CD-ROM erupted on scene, Britannica mismanaged transition. As late as 1997, it was still selling a sordid text-only compact disc which included a part of encyclopaedia. Only in 1998, did Britannica switch to multimedia and added tables and graphs to CD. Video and sound were to make their appearance even later. This error in trend analysis left field wide open to likes of Encarta and Grolier. The Britannica failed to grasp irreversible shift from cumbersome print volumes to slender and freely searchable CD-ROMs. Reference was going digital and Britannica's sales plummeted.

The Britannica was also late to cash on web revolution - but, when it did, it became a world leader overnight. Its unbeatable brand was a decisive factor. A failed experiment with an annoying subscription model gave way to unrestricted access to full contents of Encyclopaedia and much more besides: specially commissioned articles, fora, an annotated internet guide, news in context, downloads and shopping. The site enjoys healthy traffic and Britannica's CD-ROM interacts synergistically with its contents (through hyperlinks).

Yet, recently, Britannica had to fire hundreds of workers (in its web division) and a return to a pay-for-content model is contemplated. What went wrong again? Internet advertising did. The Britannica's revenue model was based on monetizing eyeballs, to use a faddish refrain. When perpetuum mobile of "advertisers pay for content and users get it free" crumbled - Britannica found itself in familiar dire straits.

Yet, have innovations of last five years transformed concept of "book" irreversibly?

The now defunct BookTailor used to sell its book-customization software mainly to travel agents. Subscribers assembled their own, private edition tome from a library of electronic content. The emerging idiosyncratic anthology was either printed and bound on demand or packaged as an e-book.

Consider what this simple business model does to entrenched and age-old notions such as "original" and "copies", copyright, and book identifiers. Is "original" final, user-customized book - or its sources? Should such one-copy print runs be eligible to unique identifiers (for instance, unique ISBN's)? Does user possess any rights in final product, compiled by him? Do copyrights of original authors still apply?

Members of BookCrossing.com community register their books in a central database, obtain a BCID (BookCrossing ID Number) and then give book to someone, or simply leave it lying around to be found. The volume's successive owners provide BookCrossing with their coordinates. This innocuous model subverts legal concept of ownership and transforms book from a passive, inert object into a catalyst of human interactions. In other words, it returns book to its origins: a dialog-provoking time capsule.

Their proponents protest that e-books are not merely an ephemeral rendition of their print predecessors - they are a new medium, an altogether different reading experience.

Consider these options: hyperlinks within e-book to Web content and reference tools; embedded instant shopping and ordering; divergent, user-interactive, decision driven plotlines; interaction with other e-books using Bluetooth or some other wireless standard; collaborative authoring, gaming and community activities; automatically or periodically updated content; multimedia capabilities; databases of bookmarks, records of reading habits, shopping habits, interaction with other readers, and plot-related decisions; automatic and embedded audio conversion and translation capabilities; full wireless piconetworking and scatternetworking capabilities; and more.

In an essay titled "The Processed Book", Joseph Esposito expounds on five important capabilities of e-books: as portals or front ends to other sources of information, as self-referencing texts, as platforms being "fingered" by other resources, as input processed by machines, and e-books serving as nodes in networks.

E-books, counter their opponents, have changed little beyond format and medium. Audio books are more revolutionary than e-books because they no longer use visual symbols. Consider scrolling protocols - lateral and vertical. The papyrus, broadsheet newspaper, and computer screen are three examples of vertical kind. The e-book, microfilm, vellum, and print book are instances of lateral scroll. Nothing new here.