CD-ROM
I'm constantly amazed that OUP has priced the OED so high for so long. When
the CDROM version first became available it was a new technology where many
reference products were priced high, but that is no longer the situation.
Using grants and other sources of money, OUP went completely electronic with
the OED a few years back — all the wealth of detail which they had stored in
paper files was transferred to computer files; I recall reading at the time
that the 70-odd years it took to "update" the 1928 edition was caused mainly
by the paper filing system and that the next (mid-90's?) edition would
require less than 10 years' work.
Given OUP's costs must have been dramatically reduced by going digital with
their storage, and that it will be much easier to go to a 2nd edition on
CDROM than it must have been to produce the first edition, one can only hope
the next disk (based I assume on the current, late 80's printed version) will
both appear soon and be priced a bit more realistically.
I suspect there would be a large market for the OED on ROM if it were list
priced under $500, and a very large market if it were under $200; as things
stand, the almost $1,000 price of the current version almost by default
limits it to institutional buyers such as colleges an and