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 for $135 million, a fraction of its book value. Safra introduced severe price-cutting measures to try to compete with "Encarta", even offering the entire reference free of charge for a time (around 18 months, from October 1999 to March 2001) on the Internet. Currently, Britannica co-operates with Taiwan companies (遠流/智慧藏學習科技公司) to provide a Traditional Chinese-English bilingual version encyclopedia on internet according to the 2002 edition. It is the first bilingual product of Britannica. Former editor-in-chief Robert McHenry believes that Britannica failed to exploit its early advantages in the market for electronic encyclopedias. Britannica had, for example, published the second multimedia