History of the Encyclopædia Britannica the criteria by which the articles were sorted were not obvious even to scholars, despite Dr. Adler's claims that the sorting followed naturally from the "Propædia's" outline of all knowledge. In 1985, the "Britannica" responded to reader requests by restoring the index as a two-volume set. The number of topics indexed by the "Britannica" has fluctuated from 500,000 (1985, the same as in 1954) to 400,000 (1989,1991) to 700,000 in the current 2007 print version. Presumably, this recent increase reflects the introduction of efficient electronic indexing, since the size of the encyclopedia has remained nearly constant at approximately 40 million
History of the Encyclopædia Britannica encyclopedia titled "Compton's MultiMedia Encyclopedia" as early as 1989 (the first one being the "Academic American Encyclopedia" published by Grolier), but did not launch "Britannica CD" until 1994, a year after Microsoft launched their "Encarta" encyclopedia. McHenry believes these failures were due to a reluctance among senior management to fully embrace the new technology, caused largely by the overriding influence of the sales staff and management. The sales personnel earned commissions from door-to-door selling of the print encyclopedias, which McHenry believes led to decisions about the distribution and pricing of the electronic products being driven by the desires of the