Photo courtesy of Wikipedia Since 1985, the Britannica has had four parts: the Micropædia, the Macropædia, the Propædia, and a two-volume index. image:39216:0::0

Encyclopedia Britannica (EB) has taken a severe beating ever since Wikipedia came into business online. According to Comscore, for every page that is viewed on Brittanica.com, nearly 184 pages are viewed on Wikipedia (3.8 billion page views per month vs. 21 million page views per month for Britannica).

Now EB wants to change that trend. Previously, EB was available for limited view only but allowed others to access the content for $70 per year and sold its 32 volume encyclopedia, which has 65,000 articles and 44 million words for $1,400. But EB will now provide the online content free for bloggers.

EB calls this new program Britannica Webshare and will make them available for bloggers provided that they are a “web publisher”. EB defines “web publisher” as follows:

This program is intended for people who publish with some regularity on the Internet, be they bloggers, webmasters, or writers. We reserve the right to deny participation to anyone who in our judgment doesn’t qualify.”

If you are a regular blogger, you can sign up, submit your URL and a description. EB reviews the application and will decide whether to let you access the site for free.

Once you are chosen, you can access the full versions of article and you can post that link in your site. Your readers can read the full article but they can’t access other parts of the site. You can also embed articles as shown in this one.

Britannica uses nearly 4,000 contributors to write the encyclopedia articles.

TechCrunch said this effort is “half pregnant,” instead of making it free for everyone. It is free for some not free for the public. With this effort, EB might be trying to get more search share, and get money from the subscription model and the 32 volume book set.

Michael Arrington from TechCrunch thinks that eventually EB will become free and separate itself from Wikipedia with expert contributors similar to Citizendium, created by Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger in 2006.