Scarcity Truthers
&gt; Then a man named Bill Gates came along and he decided that they were going to give away a free encyclopedia with every damn bit of his personal computer software. Away went our $50 million a year. Now, we still sell the encyclopedias in libraries, making a few million per year doing that. But most of the wealth just went away and all that wonderful constructive product.<p>Encarta was (and is?[1]) great, and I&#x27;m disappointed that Microsoft discontinued it. As much as I use wikipedia, I still think that shipping a decent curated encyclopedia with every computer&#x2F;tablet&#x2F;phone is a fantastic idea.<p>One of my favorite features of macOS is that it still contains a built-in dictionary that you can access even if you&#x27;re offline.<p>Did Rhapsody&#x2F;Mac OS X ever include the complete works of Shakespeare like NeXT originally did? Given the massive amounts of storage that we have today, I wouldn&#x27;t mind having a built-in high-quality library of classics and reference works included in every phone, tablet, and PC.<p>One of my favorite things about Raspbian is that it includes Mathematica and Sonic Pi.<p>Perhaps there is an educational Linux distro that includes curated offline versions of Wikipedia, Project Gutenberg, Khan academy, etc. as well as educational software?<p>[1] Apparently you can still download Encarta 2009 from the internet archive.