By LJ Staff

The movement from "free to fee" proved the kiss of death for many information-based web sites that now are fading memories, but Encyclopedia Britannica reports that it is doing brisk business five months after instituting a charge for its initially free Britannica.com site. Britannica said that not only is it enjoying "strong and steady sales of new subscriptions" but insists that converting to a fee-based site has helped it re-sign colleges and libraries that had dropped the Britannica Online institutional site when the encyclopedia became free, thus benefiting both the consumer and institutional Internet business. Britannica's Director of Corporate Communications, Tom Panelas explained to LJ that the company had previously had two web elements: Britannica.com, a free site for consumers, and Britannica Online, a subscription site for libraries, colleges, and research facilities. After paying for access to Britannica Online, however, many institutions "not surprisingly" dropped their subscriptions and began using the Britannica.com consumer site. "By once again charging for the consumer product so that you could no longer get the full database free," Panelas said, "that created an incentive for institutions that had stopped subscribing to come back."