Posted on 08/29/2010 5:09:06 PM PDT by Stoat
It was first published 126 years ago and is respected the world over.
But the Oxford English Dictionary will never appear in print again, its owners have announced.
Instead, the 80 lexicographers who have been working on the third edition for the past 21 years have been told the fruits of their labour will exist solely online.
The OED has been available on the internet for the past ten years and receives two million hits a month from subscribers who pay £205 a year, plus VAT, to access it.
Oxford University Press says the dominance of the internet means the latest update to the definitive record of the English language - currently 28 per cent complete - will never be published in print.
'The print dictionary market is just disappearing - it is falling away by tens of per cent a year,' said Nigel Portwood, 44, chief executive of OUP.
'Our primary purpose - and this takes a bit of adjusting to - is not profit, it is the dissemination of knowledge,' he said.
'Print is still pretty important round here but, wherever possible, if there is an opportunity, we are moving out of it.'
The printed dictionary has a shelf life of another 30 years, he predicts.
The third edition is only expected to be completed by 2037. The OUP has already stopped producing illustrated reference books because of the growing popularity of the Wikipedia website.
R
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
For me, thinning out my library is like going to an all night dentist.
I agree....the tactile pleasure of holding a 'real' book in your hands will be eventually lost and replaced by a glowing screen on a device where lending or reselling your books is either impossible or highly problematic. Moving entirely to a proprietary e-book format allows copyright holders to rigidly regulate their properties and maximize their profits. Instead of being able to simply hand a friend your copy of a book as a loan, you'll now have to either hand the friend your electronic reading device, which also contains your entire book collection, or tell your friend to go buy his own electronic copy. And when you're through with a book, your options for selling it will be either impossible or strictly regulated.
Has anyone else read/listened to “The Professor and the Madman”?
An enemy, in 10 years or so, explodes a series of ElectroMagnetic Pulse (EMP) Nukes over us and Europe. I tend to doubt the absolute total wipe-out scenarios, BUT it wouldn't be pretty.
Just sayin ...
Either that of a burst from the sun directly to earth - as has happened before, knocking out what electrical technology we had at the time - like telegraph transformers - could be tantamount to the burning of the Constantinople Library.
That set civilization - sciences, medicine, etc., - back hundreds of years.
I tell my kids and grandkids: PRINT OUT YOUR BEST PHOTOS and get them safely into albums. Print out email letters you don't want to lose forever and, also, WRITE REAL LETTERS.
I have photos that are are over 100 years old of family.
I have bundles of letters from my dear late grandparents - from the 30’s-40’s, and from my late parents. They are are wealth of family history. (Indeed, I have a book written by one of my 7th great great grandfathers in the 1600’s. (Gov. Wm. Bradford of the Mayflower. He wrote a journal for the family about the 20 years of struggle before, during and after the crossing to Plymouth. It was hunted down and printed in the late 1800’s. I have that edition as well as the one that has been continually reprinted for the past 60 years. Had that not been first in his pen on paper and then printed, it would have long been lost, along with all the history. Nearly everything we know about the Pilgrims is from this original family journal.)
In the last 10 years, we have gone from VCR’s to floppys to CD’s to DVD’s and those are already changing in size. It won't be long before whatever is on them will be trapped - as machines for playing them will change and become obsolete.
The written letter, the printed photo and the printed book will not become obsolete by ‘disappearing.’
Good grief, I'm glad I have an extensive collection of books...but now I'm thinking I need to start collecting libraries for my kids and grandkids.
Insanity.
I had read a review of that one once...and sincerely intended to get around to looking for it when it came out in paper back or in a used edition.
But like so many things, newer shinier books caught my eye.
How was it?
This has concerned me quite a bit for a long time, what with society's increasing reliance on electronic data storage.
I work in healthcare, and the idea of everybody in a city losing their entire medical history, and for patients in a hospital losing their ongoing care histories as well as x-rays is not a scenario that I look forward to. A few EMP detonations will bring us all down to a Medieval level pretty darned fast
Now people will have to look it up in their Funk & Wagnalls...
It’s a fascinating and unexpected story well told.
sure they get the better deal-let them build those tiny little houses that are being touted the latest housing fad - with no bookshelves-they don’t need them,do they? let them have a kid & then things will change unless the USA is moving towards a population of no families .....just single people living in little boxes....crikey!!
The upper echelons of the military have diamond substrate CPUs. Those will laugh at an EMP.
Shielding techniques can be pretty effective too. A grounded metal building that never lets you get a cellphone signal may ground an EMP as well.
Optical CD storage will be okay.
This is truly hugh and series. I’m gobsmacked. This is truly news. Thanks for posting it.
Now we truly enter a new era.
...and the people will be no better off than they were during the Dark Ages when only the Church and royalty had access to "the truth." We have a very good example of that today....it's called islam.
With telecommuting, this opens the possiblity of living in your cubicle. Add on the optional Japanese sex robot....
“If you like encyclopedias try to find the 1913 edition of the EB.”
Mine is 1929, any good?
“embiggen”
Nice!
Married couples first starting out were the biggest targets of these encyclopedia salesmen, because they loved to sell the fact that you were making an investment in the education of your children - even if they hadn't been born yet, they will surely grow up so much smarter with a set of encyclopedias in the house.
Yes, we did succumb and on or around 1986, we went for a set of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Costed us over $2,000 when all was said and done but I must say I never regretted the purchase, although I made use of them way more than my kids ever did. They sure did look nice on the oak bookshelf in my den and they got a lot of use until about the mid 1990s when computers and internet started taking over.
Around that time, I purchased the Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia. Now that was a joy. Came on multiple CD-ROMs so you were constantly changing out CD-ROMs in your computer and having to wait for them to spin up. Oftentimes, they would crash the system (Win95) and you'd have to reboot the computer just to view an article. Encarta was big on multimedia but I always found the audio and video material of the encyclopedia weak. For example, the article on Beethoven would contain little snippets of some of his works, not nearly enough to get the full flavor. The article on Scotland had a film clip of men in skirts playing bagpipes. You get the idea.
I paid good money for Encarta but after a few frustrated sessions, the disks got pushed into a back corner of the computer room closet (joining the likes of Myst, Microsoft Cinema and other CD-ROM junk) where they were all unceremoniously trashed during spring cleaning a few years back.
Meanwhile, the 1986 Britannica set was donated to another family member where it is still hopefully getting some use today.
This is truly hugh and series. I’m gobsmacked. This is truly news. Thanks for posting it.
You're quite welcome, and I'm delighted that you've found it to be worthwhile ;-)
Now we truly enter a new era.
Well, in truth I believe that we will still be able to browse our bookstores for a little while longer although the trend is definitely moving toward the electronic medium.
The full, 20-volume OED will naturally be an early candidate to drop out of print availability because it's expensive to produce and has an extremely limited buying customer base....usually just libraries. Most private individuals don't buy it for themselves because of the cost and space requirements as well as the fact that it goes into FAR more etymological detail than what's needed in common parlance. The level of depth that it goes into regarding word histories and the numerous citations it provides for obsolete words is great to have as a record of the language and for specialist wordsmiths but is really not needed by most people in most common situations. For those interested in modern definitions and advice as to common usage scenarios, the full, 20-volume OED is cumbersome at best, and the CD and online subscription formats have been gaining popularity for years among those who need the full horsepower of the complete work. The search options provide quite a bit more convenience as well as enhanced and streamlined research opportunities over the paper version.
Who kneads a dictionary when won has spell check? Their always going to be write in they’re righting.
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