The 2010 edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica will be the last printed version. It will focus on its online version from now on.

“It’s a rite of passage in this new era,” Jorge Cauz, the president of Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc., a company based in Chicago, said in an interview. “Some people will feel sad about it and nostalgic about it. But we have a better tool now. The Web site is continuously updated, it’s much more expansive and it has multimedia.”

The Wikipedia entry for it has already been updated.