Oxford Dictionary Considers Going Online Only

Kilrah_il writes "Oxford University Press has confirmed that they are considering offering their next version of the Oxford English Dictionary as an online version only, with no option for a hardcopy. The 20-volume set, whose last edition (2nd) was published in 1989, weighs 145 pounds (65kg) and costs about $1,165. It is considered the 'accepted authority on the meaning and history of words.' In 2000, the dictionary was offered online for $295 a year and has been getting 2 million hits a month from subscribers. The printed version, on the other hand, has sales of only 30,000. Work is now progressing on the 3rd edition, but it's still a decade or more away from completion. Oxford University Press is considering going online-only with the next edition of their flagship product, but not for other products such as their best-selling Advanced Learner's Dictionary. At least for now."

Of course they do...

[Darkness404]

Of course they want to go online only, think about it, a 10 year subscription is over $2,000 for them to pocket compared to only $1,165 for the printed copy that lasts a decade. Plus, they can raise that fee in the future and don't have materials cost (which is significant in a book that large)

Resist the urge!

[blankinthefill]

I've been lusting after a full copy of the OED since I was introduced to it in my Freshman year of High School. However, as a poor college student majoring in Math, I just can't justify the costs right now... However, once I'm able to, I know I will be purchasing the full set, and would almost certainly purchase the 3rd edition when it is finally ready. While I know that I'm part of a very small minority, I think my existence (as an average person, not a writer, with an education in the sciences and not language) as a soon to be customer shows that there IS a market for these in print, and that much of this market would be absolutely devastated if the OED did go online only.

Re:A tidy sum in sales of the printed version...

[Red Flayer]

Too bad production costs for a print run that small are huge. They're probably making unit profit on the hard copy somewhat close to what they're charging for the soft copy license. But there are a lot of fixed costs with the OED... editors, researchers, typesetting, etc. That thing's got a lot of pages!

Besides, you buy the hard copy, you keep it on your shelf for 20-25 years or so until the next edition comes out.

Instead, they get you @ $295/yr for 20 years assuming price doesn't change). Yes, you get easy access to updated content... but instead of spending $1165, you're spending around $6000 over that twenty-year period.

So instead of $35 million over 20 years, you're talking $165 million. Now THAT's getting close to a worthwhile sum of cash.

Re:Consumer financial sense???

[Darkness404]

On one hand I can see the advantage of something online, for one thing its a whole lot easier to type in to a definition box a word than search through a dictionary filled with tiny print. But on the other hand I can't see there being much of a market for it. If I want a definition of a word, why wouldn't I just Google it? If I needed more examples I'd go to Wikipedia. Unless I'm an English major there is really no need for the average person to even touch the OED and even for English majors unless your specialty is finding old, out of use words and meanings, even you won't use it. For the 2 times a college student somehow needs to use the OED, its just as easy to buy a print copy that will last a long time than a search-able database that is used a few times during the year.

Other than academia, the OED has no real niche, I'm not going to subscribe to it when I can use Google/Wikipedia/Dictionary.com/etc and get it all for free with the relevant definitions and if I really, really, really need to look something up, why wouldn't I just go to a library with it? Its not like its going to be used/checked out...

Hardcover, physical books would save the university money in the long run, and other than total bibliophiles, no one is going to get the OED when there are free, good references available.

Re:Only 2 million hits/month?

[Jerry Rivers]

"Napkin" has other meanings, and it might just be worth saving your American self from embarrassment if you ever actually visit a hugely populated country where alternative meanings are regularly used. I can only imagine the looks might get when asking for a napkin.

It's rarely good to be ignorant.

Re:Kindle version?

[RapmasterT]

sure, who wouldn't want to spend hundreds of dollars on a DRM restricted copy of something in a format that isn't guaranteed to even be supported in 5 years. I'd MUCH rather have it in a self-contained CD format, or even better some kind of format that didn't need a special program, or reader, or even device to read. If only someone could come up with some way of having text information archived in a format that was completely device independent, and or even usable without electricity...THAT would be revolutionary. I'd sign up for that. If only it existed.

Re:Consumer financial sense???

[DragonWriter]

So instead of paying $1,165 for something you can touch and have access to whenever you want (and possibly resell) Oxford thinks consumers would rather pay $8,850 ($295/year * 30 years (rough average time between releases)) and get something that they cannot access whenever they want (servers go down, power outages, etc.) instead?

Yes, they do, and they are probably right, since they're online subscriptions already vastly outnumber the full-size, full-content hardcopy sales.

Of course, you forget the benefits that online access has over the takes-a-whole-bookshelf edition: you can access it anywhere you have internet access, rather than anywhere you have the whole bookshelf with you, and you get the updates between hardcopy releases as the drafts are ready, rather than having to wait through the multi-decade cycle of hardcopy releases.

Considering that the whole reason to spend the large amount of money to get either the bookshelf version or the online version of the OED is that a complete lexicon of the English language is important to the user, the online version makes a lot of sense to the people that are in the market for the OED in the first place.

Also, considering that a lot of the online use is institutional, not individual, which has different pricing and often includes permission to download the entire database to local servers rather than accessing it from Oxford's servers (and, also, that most of the bookshelf-versions hardcopy sales are to institutional purchasers) and retiring the bookshelf-sized hardcopy version in favor of online access makes a lot of sense.

Re:That's too bad.

[jd]

Assuming it does disappear. The Oxford Press hasn't made a final decision and won't until much closer to the time of publication. It might well be that they're deliberately stoking the fires so that they can start putting out requests for "advance orders". If they sold just as many copies but got the cash 10-20 years earlier than they otherwise would have, they've 10-20 years worth of interest they can collect for extra profit. That would be a big difference.

Re:A tidy sum in sales of the printed version...

[arth1]

I went to the OED site, wondering whether it was possible to still buy the paper version. It is, and it's not $1165 like the submission here claims; it's only $995.
That's only $50 per leather-bound volume, or less than your average O'Reilly animal series paperback.

The problem with DVD versions is that they rely on specific software that won't be available a decade from now. I can't use my Encyclopædia Britannica DVD from a few years ago, because it's incompatible with modern operating systems. Had I bought the paper version instead, it would have had access, and so would my kids. And it would have seen a whole lot more use.

Similar with OED -- this made my mind up that I need to buy the paper version of OED while it's still possible.

Re:Of course they do...

[PCM2]

The OED is the perfect example of DEAD MEAT. Hopelessly fusty, out of date, and living in the past. They survive purely on snobbery.

It's a dictionary. How exactly would a dictionary "live in the future"? By making up its own definitions of words?

The OED is not like other dictionaries. If you're reading a book and you notice a word whose meaning you don't know, you probably don't go running off to the public library to consult the OED. Merriam-Webster will suffice. But if you want to know why a word means what it does, and since when, and who was the one to start using it in that way, and in what context, and how its meaning might have evolved over the years, then the OED is the source for you -- and probably the only source.

OED editors meticulously track down references for every definition included in the book, and they cite them: Shakespeare used this word in this way with this slightly-different spelling in this edition of this play in this year. That's what makes it the definitive reference to English words.

You can call that "snobbery" if you want. Some call it scholarship. If you think the two are the same, you're probably on the wrong site.

Re:Paying for a dictionary over the internet?

[Fluffy Bunnies]

Funny. When I do corpus linguistics, a dictionary is often exactly where I start from. What kind of relevant research do you do, exactly?

Maybe the secondary meaning wasn't obscure when the text was written. Or it isn't obscure in the writer's native dialect. Or maybe the writer really was being an ass, but you still need to figure out what they were saying. What kind of bullshit argument is this?