Encyclopaedia Britannica print sets sold

Encyclopaedia Britannica's print sales fell as vinyl records rose, which is the kind of media inversion only a hipster could love. One physical object failed to survive the internet. Another was rescued by it. The shelf, somehow, is still full.

Two opposing trends with the same root cause: how the internet handled different forms of physical media. Encyclopedias had no advantage over Wikipedia and effectively went extinct in print, while vinyl was rescued by a nostalgia-driven revival as digital music made the physical object newly meaningful. One medium offered information; the other offered an object. Only one of those was easy to replace online.

So the correlation is two physical media tested by the same disruption. One died. The other was reborn. The shelf does not know the difference.