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
Compton's Encyclopedia in 2002. Britannica had sold its Compton's interests to the Tribune Company in 1993, and for a time "Compton's Encyclopedia" was a product of The Learning Company, which purchased Brøderbund in 1998. In March 2002 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. "acquired an exclusive license to publish and distribute "Compton's Encyclopedia" in print and CD-ROM from Broderbund LLC and Success Publishing Group". Britannica's 1989 "Compton's Multimedia Encyclopedia" was the first "multimedia" CD-ROM encyclopedia. It won the 1991 Software Publishers Association Excellence in Software Award for Best Education Program. Grolier's 1985 "Academic American Encyclopedia on CD-ROM" was text-only. In 1990, when it was called