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.
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.
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.
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.
The unabridged OED is basically a boutique product, like the collector's edition of a video game. People want it in order to show it off, or to say they bought it—they just need it to be useful in some way to rationalize the purchase. The physical artifacts (eBook reader + spec manual) would serve to retain the boutique market (to give them something to show off/"preserve in a private archival collection"), while the digital content would reduce O(N) production costs to near nothing.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
Grab the compact OED, perhaps? It's no longer $200 new, but you could get it used. And the compact one is heavier & bigger than any volume of the 20+vol edition, so it keeps the physicalness in spades.
See again - where's the geek cred in a compact edition and magnifying glass? I want the 'I built this bookcase especially' kind of moment when my guests arrive, more so than the 'Wow, aren't Jacob's biceps large for such a complete nerd?' kind of moment.
> See again - where's the geek cred in a compact edition and magnifying glass?
Performance art. When some fool has questioned my mastery of the English language, and I have pummeled him into submission by reciting aloud the definition, I can then stare at him through the magnifying glass. One large eye, blinking.
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 :)
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.