The CEO of the company that publishes the venerable Oxford English Dictionary said on the weekend that he doesn’t think the massive reference work will ever appear in print again, thanks to a continuing decline in demand for the hard-cover version. Although the company later said that there is still a chance a printed version will be published, that chance seems to be getting more remote by the day. Which raises the question: Does it matter whether there is a printed version of a reference work like the Oxford English Dictionary, or is online good enough?
Nigel Portwood, the Oxford University Press chief executive, told the Sunday Times that demand for the printed version of the dictionary — which had 20 volumes in its last printing in 1989, and cost $ 1,165 — had been dropping every year for the last decade, while demand for the online version (which costs $ 295 a year) continues to climb. When asked whether the next version of the legendary work would be available in print form, he said “I don’t think so” (a spokesman for the company later said that “no decision has yet been made on the format of the third edition,” and that a print version “will certainly be considered if there is sufficient demand at the time of publication”).
One of the main reasons why the OUP can’t be definitive about the eventual format of the next edition is that work on the new version of the dictionary is less than 30-percent complete, according to the company. A team of 80 lexicographers have been working on the new edition for decades already, and they are estimated to be at least another decade away from completion. The last version of the OED contained almost one-third of a million entries (the first version of the dictionary was begun in 1879 and released in sections over a 44-year period from 1884 to 1928).
The decline of the printed reference work, of course — which has also impacted companies like Encyclopedia Britannica — is just part of the broader transformation of the book, as e-book sales continue to climb and hard-cover sales fall. Simon Winchester, author of “The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary,” told the Telegraph that until recently he had been “clinging to the idea that printed books would likely last for ever,” but that with the arrival of the Apple iPad “I am now wholly convinced otherwise.” Winchester said that “books are about to vanish [but] reading is about to expand as a pastime. These are inescapable realities.”
We seem to be growing gradually used to the idea that newspapers may move completely online, and that printed books may also become more of a novelty than a business. But should a major reference work like the OED go online only? It seems inevitable. But just because the dictionary publishes online doesn’t mean that it has to submit completely to the real-time frenzy of the web, and try to emulate Wikipedia. The OUP could continue to update the dictionary only at certain intervals, but this job would be a whole lot easier — not to mention substantially less expensive — without the need to print dozens of books for just a single copy of the finished product.
Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d): The Price of e-Book Progress
Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user thrig
