
Oxford English Dictionary May Never Be Published Again - hachiya
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/oxford_english_dictionary_may_never_be_published_a.php
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blahedo
Thoroughly mixed feelings here. As computer-geeky as I am, I have literally
made use of my dead-tree encyclopaedia exactly once in the last seven
years[1], so I would have a very hard time justifying to anyone why they
should spend money on buying anything like that.

On the other hand, I do actually still have the encyclopaedia on my
bookshelves, and I would never want to give that up. I'm fairly young (32) but
old enough to have been raised believing that any household with even the
pretensions of education simply _must_ have an encyclopaedia on its bookshelf
(and visible, at that). Having it in physical form has an almost talismanic
value.

So yeah. I'd kind of love to have a dead-tree OED on my shelves. But I'd
rarely use it and it's pretty hard to justify the cost in any remotely
rational terms.

[1]It was during an internet outage and I wanted to know the latitude of
southern Scotland, so that I could calculate roughly when sunrise would be in
mid-December, because this turned out to be plot-relevant in a suspense novel
I was reading at the time. The whole enterprise was outrageously geeky.

~~~
kijuhyujk
Library sales - I have a 10year old encyclopedia Britanica (ok not a classic
edition) on my shelf for about $20 and a 2 volume OED for $10.

I don't need to justify it ;-)

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derefr
How about publishing it as a physical, digital artifact? An open-hardware
eBook reader, preloaded with the unabridged OED in an open format, would be of
about equivalent archival and academic value. You could even include a dead-
tree technical manual and format spec in the box, to ensure that you could
boot it up and get it running again in a few hundred years.

~~~
avar
Or, just sell it in an open eBook format that can be read on any eBook reader.
That way they don't have to worry about hardware at all, and can sell to any
existing device like the iPad, Kindle etc.

~~~
derefr
They already maintain it as a searchable database, which is an even better
thing to have—and online, which means you don't even have to store it
yourself! ;)

The point of the hardware is that _owning_ the Unabridged OED is an
_experience_ , and, if they want to sell that experience, they need control of
both the hardware and content. Plus, people are irrational: give them a
_thing_ to buy (and to show off) and they'll feel much better with their
"investment" than if the result is just 3GB of DB2 files.

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brazzy
Printed books are a thing of the past, you'll get used to it.

Yes, I'm talking about books in general. Dictionaries and encyclopedias are
just the extreme cases where the sheer size makes the advantages (especially
searchability and linking) of electronic media so obvious (relative to the
disadvantages) that it's already killing the paper versions. Most other kinds
of printed books will follow sooner or later.

All this blah-blah about "haptic experiences" ist just nostalgia mixed with
(perfectly legitimate) concerns about the usability of electronic media
available today - but there's almost limitless room for improvement there,
while paper books have none.

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mturmon
I have a hard-copy OED in the full-size edition. I always use online
dictionaries because I don't much care about etymology (which is the OED
specialty), and because looking words up manually is tedious. If you're
thinking about getting one, maybe start with the unabridged Webster's third
and see how it goes?

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JacobAldridge
A much more thorough discussion of this cultural icon than yesterday's
Telegraph article (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1645180>), so excuse
me for supporting it with a rehash of my comment there -

The OED is the #1 item on my geek to-buy list. Even as a bespoke item
(possibly more than the $1600 mentioned here) I hope the 20+ volume edition of
OED3 is ultimately available. I may be able to justify the expense in another
decade, when it's due for completion.

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kranner
Buy the CD. I kept a Windows virtual machine around for a long time _just_ for
my OED CD.

They need to lose that DRM scheme though.

~~~
JacobAldridge
But where's the geek cred in a CD? I want to be able to point out my volumes
to guests.

And, sad but true, I am known to flick through my 'Fowler's Guide to Modern
English' randomly reading interesting words and phrases; that's what I want to
do with my OED.

~~~
kranner
I presume you mean Fowler's Modern English Usage. Very underrated in our
barbaric times. I believe the bit on hyphenation carries on for 14 four-column
pages?

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grigy
Regarding the dictionaries it's much more easier to use them in electronic
form. Even when reading normal books I'm sometimes trying to "search" a word
in a text :)

