Sidebar: The single exception to holding the main Britannica corpus aloof from electronic applications was an agreement made in 1981 to permit the text to be made available and searchable on Mead Data Central's Nexis-Lexis system. I have no information regarding how or by whom this decision was made. It seems clear that this venture was deemed acceptable because Nexis-Lexis, running on a proprietary network and used at significant cost by professional researchers, posed no threat at all to home field sales. One might even guess that it even provided a handy riposte to those who might criticize Britannica for failing to engage the electronic field. Just to make very, very sure that there would be no effect on sales, users who accessed Britannica on Nexis were denied the ability to print out articles.

The association ended in the late 1980s when, the original data having aged considerably, Mead Data asked for the current version of the database but was unwilling to bear the cost of parsing the data into the appropriate format.