stylistic:style_transfer, information:classification
Competition

As the Britannica is a general encyclopaedia, it does not seek to compete with specialized encyclopaedias such as the Encyclopaedia of Mathematics or the Dictionary of the Middle Ages, which can devote much more space to their chosen topics. In its first years, the Britannica ' s main competitor was the general encyclopaedia of Ephraim Chambers and, soon thereafter, Rees's Cyclopædia and Coleridge's Encyclopædia Metropolitana. In the 20th century, successful competitors included Collier's Encyclopedia, the Encyclopedia Americana, and the World Book Encyclopedia. Nevertheless, from the 9th edition onwards, the Britannica was widely considered to have the greatest authority of any general English-language encyclopaedia, especially because of its broad coverage and eminent authors. The print version of the Britannica was significantly more expensive than its competitors.

Since the early 1990s, the Britannica has faced new challenges from digital information sources. The Internet, facilitated by the development of search engines, has grown into a common source of information for many people, and provides easy access to reliable original sources and expert opinions, thanks in part to initiatives such as Google Books, MIT 's release of its educational materials and the open PubMed Central library of the National Library of Medicine.

The Internet tends to provide more current coverage than print media, due to the ease with which material on the Internet can be updated. In rapidly changing fields such as science, technology, politics, culture and modern history, the Britannica has struggled to stay up to date, a problem first analysed systematically by its former editor Walter Yust. Eventually, the Britannica turned to focus more on its online edition.