#OED
20 messages in this thread
Richard Day
R.E. the price of the OED on CD-ROM. The OED has, for nearly a
century been the ultimate dictionary of the English Language. The Original
edition was a largely volentary effort by scholars of the language from all
over Britain, the United States, and the British Empire, which at the time,
inc uded Austraila, India, (and perhaps Canada, I am not sure which came
first, the OED or Canadian Dominion.)
The pricing of the CD-ROM takes into account the fact that for
bookish scholars, the print edition of the OED is still the primary
product. There is no way to print and ship the OED in hardbound form for
less that a couple of grand. There is still some thinking that runs like
this…"if the CD-ROM version sells for $200, the libraries will be tempted
to buy it and install 286 PC's with a CD-ROM drive, and not buy the print
edition. OH MY GOD, THE NEXT GENERATION OF SCHOLARS WILL NOT PERUSE THE
PAPER VOLUMES OF THE OED, BUT RATHER READ IT OFF COMPUTER SCREENS!!!
SACRELIG IN THE EXTREME!!!!"
(Is "sacrelig" an actual word? The OED, the ultimate arbitrator of
such questions, will tell you.)
For the Bible of English Language Scholarship to be replaced by
didgital data on a computer screen, is, to many of the scholars who
volenteer their time toward the production of the OED, sacreligious. The
continued production of the OED depends on the continued work of thousands
of scholars of the language, university proffessors, journalists, and
writers who continue to volentarily submit material.
For this reason, the pricing strategy of the CD-ROM version of the
OED will always be, to protect the Hardbound Print Edition, whose printing
and shipping costs will always be so much higher than simply stamping out a
CD, (which in production runs of 1000, cost $2 each.)
Given the etymology is of Romanic provenance (sacrilegium in the Latin
nominative case, itself from sacrilegus) through Old French to the current
English usage, I would suggest 'sacrilegious' would be the word the OED would
approve. The Latin stem 'sacri-' has been preserved through all stages of the
word's usage, even in the Middle English period when there was some tendency
to use 'e' in place of the 'i'. The Latin origin was 'sacred' plus 'legere'
but you will need to revert to the Latin grammar to see how the stem is
arrived at.
Anyway, you have me digressing. Yes, I am somewhat familiar with how the OED
is composed. But I absolutely cannot agree with the pricing argument you put
forward. Leaving aside issues relating to publicity costs, a book publisher's
primary manufacturing costs can be broken down into: type setting and page
design, film production, paper, printing and binding costs. The first
(setting type and laying out pages) is the most labor intensive and hence
tends to be very costly. The remaining cost elements are relatively
inexpensive.
What I was saying in my earlier message on this subject was, now the OED is
stored in digital form, it will be much cheaper to reproduce – and that
applies to the paper edition, too, as the page layout/type setting costs
should be cut dramatically when the text does not have to be keyboarded from
scratch.
I have spent the past 25 years in magazine and book printing and publishing
(21 of them in Asia) and I would _love_ to be paid a couple of grand a copy
to produce and ship the OED!
To give you some idea of what it could be done for: I saw a pirated version
of the 1928 edition plus supplements (I think it totalled something like 14
volumes) for sale in a Taiwan bookshop some years ago. The Taiwan "publisher"
had made his film direct from the pages of a real OED, so scratch type
setting and layout costs. It was on retail sale for the equivalent of US$150
and you can assume between 30 and 50 percent of that was profit in the
distribution chain. …. continues ….>
<….continuing ….
The Taiwan copy was well printed on what I would rate as good paper and was
decently stitched and case bound. (I did not buy it and Taiwan no longer
does that sort of knock-off; their industry has grown up).
Without doing a serious analysis, I would guess I could get the OED off the
printing press, bound and ready for delivery, for around US$200 a copy,
possibly a lot less. To give you some indication of print manufacturing
costs, I produced a 240-page paperback textbook on high quality European
paper, heavily b/w illustrated, with some text translated and set in Chinese,
about a year ago – the press run was short (well under 10,000 copies) and my
manufacturing cost was less than 70 cents a copy! It sold in bookstores for
US$6.50 a copy, which will give you some idea of the mark-ups publishers and
the distribution chain add to print.
So – a long way round – I don't "buy" the pricing argument on the OED. In the
past, when each edition needed to be manually type set and printing/binding
was less well automated, I could see it. Today, no, I think the company is
clinging to an exotic price in part to maintain the exclusive image of the
product.
As for my sacrilegist view on the CD-ROM product: wading through multiple
volumes of anything on paper is tedious and counter productive; scholars are
already "buried" under more information than they can comfortably work with
and any tool which promises much quicker research should be welcomed …
certainly the OUP would do us all a favor if it were to price a CD-ROM
version a lot more realistically and let it become available to the smaller
schools and to private individuals who otherwise would most probably not be
able to afford it. I would love to have it available to my children here at
home, but buying one disk at a cost greater than what I have paid for the
dozen or so I already have …?
Oh well, I suppose I will just have to go on wishing that, just as British
barristers seem to finally be forsaking horse hair wigs…Regds Ric
You seem to be ignoring 2 factors.
1. The *value* of the information.
2. The costs of production of the information.
There are difficulties in assessing the value of information as a
commodity but you shouldn't ignore it and you must also cost the
process of collection, collation, definition, selection etc which I
suspect the OUP couldn't even estimate themselves.
GarethM (Who has the new OED-CD on order and also has it on paper,
although the compressed edition)
Agreed, the *value* is surely arbitrary – "eye of the beholder" territory. As
to cost of collection:
1. it is incremental in the sense OUP has been building this for about
a century; at the same time, the intervals between editions have been
stunningly long, so the cost per annum must be quite low while sales
were likely fairly steady over the years.
2. OUP has been fairly successful at garnering both contributed
facilities (such as computers) and contributed (non-paid)
information, both helping keep cost down.
In the case of a product like the OED, one suspects pricing to a fair extent
is both historical and strategic: historically high manufacturing costs
feeding into a smaller past market would have argued to a high price; and a
high price currently helps hold that "king of the hill" position.
I guess at the end of the day (actually, early hours of the morning!) what I
am arguing for is this: with the advent of CD-ROM technology and the OED data
held in digital form, OUP has an opportunity to make an incredible
information resource quite widely available at a reasonable price; so long as
the price is very high, access to that resource will be restricted to an
elite. And that, I feel, is a very great pity.
Regds Ric – who will probably buy the next CD-ROM release despite the
probable cost, but whose eyes never could handle the
affordable compressed edition 8-}
Richard, I am another potential CD-OED purchaser if the price goes down.
One argument you neglected was that the cost of production of the
information cannot be applied to the CD version since it has already be
paid for by the paper one. The only real costs are for putting the
information into CD usable format. I believe the OUP already had the OED in
electronic format for the paper publication — I've read articles about the
sophisticated system they use to keep it all straight. Good luck to both of
us, and countless other potential OED CD purchasers! Kathy
Kathy – good point. Actually, I suspect a properly priced, mass-market disk
would generate such a large revenue stream, it would be financing the paper
version! Let's hope OUP moves into this century before it ends!
Regds Ric
Ric,
I guess we're talking two kinds of marketing here — one based on large
volume and low price and the other on scarcity & high price. Either one
can make money, but it really depends on how the vendor perceives his
market. As a member of the OUP potential market, I hope they begin to see
that their market could be much larger than it now is if their prices were
more affordable. The OED is such a fine document, and could benefit so
many scholars (among others), it seems an educational institution such as
Oxford would want to share it with the rest of us.
Kathy
> 1. The *value* of the information.
The value of the information is arbitrarily determined by the potential
purchaser. If it is priced beyond the perceived value, to any given person,
that person will not purchase it.
> 2. The costs of production of the information.
The costs of production are determined strictly by the producers of the
information, though there are many ways to come up with the final figure.
Taking both of these together, the profit to the producer (and to anyone in
the distribution chain), will be maximal at one particular price point. I
know _I_ would not pay over $800 for a CDROM OED, but would not be able to
resist at $100. Since I have no real _need_ for the information, but only a
desire, I think you would agree that the higher price is somewhat out of
line for my purposes. I firmly believe that there are a GREAT many people
with the same feelings, and that there is a price at which a maximum number
could be sold, with consequent maximum profit. Bottom line is that the
product is worth what the people will pay for it.
To price it high because of some sense of duty to the print edition, is, in
my opinion, the epitome of snobbish stupidity.
-larry
Larry,
I don't even have a CD-ROM player yet (well one on the PC, but that
hardly counts) and I'd pay $100 for the OED….just for those times
when……. (you know). I guess what I'm saying is that $100 is UNDER my
impulse buying point, but $800 is NOT.
>…but would not be able to resist at $100.
Well-said, Larry. My feelings exactly.
robin
One of the advantages of digitized dictionaries is the ease of spell
checking. I counted six errors in your rather long message (smile).
Six?! Back to basics, evidently. I do love spell checking software (English
is/was not my first language, though I'm quite comfortable with it), but I
have not figured out how to run a spell checker inside my Recon editor. Sigh.
Regds Ric
Your comfort with the English language is evident. May I ask you what your
native language was?
It was a combination of Irish (Gaelic) and Dutch. I was borne in the "deep
south" of Ireland at a time the Irish government and much of the local
population was trying to revive the "native" language. My Irish nanny was
married to a Hollander, so when she wasn't using the local lingo she was
gargling away in Dutch. I now recall perhaps 10 words of Irish, but am
moderately comfortable with Dutch. When my father's business interests took
us to Africa, my "native" language became a mix of English, Xhosa and Shona,
though my parents often used French between themselves for privacy. Next came
a fairly intensive period of German (Jesuit tutor). College was mostly
English; for the past 21 years I have lived in Hong Kong where I married a
Cantonese Chinese and "home" language became a mix of Cantonese and English,
with the kids using Mandarin Chinese to cut father out of the conversation. I
moved the family to Canada in March this year, so I suspect the kids at least
will be adding the local variant on French to the dinner table.
Yes, I am comfortable with English. I once made a fairly comforable living
for some years writing magazine articles in English, which is the language I
mostly think in; it is certainly, because of its richness/depth, my favorite.
Sorry, this has become a somewhat long answer to a simple question. Hope it
makes some sense.
Regds Ric
On the subject of spell checkers. Is there one I can run from within
TAPCIS?
Bruce – no, I have not come across a spell checker that works in TAPCIS,
though I must admit I have not been looking all that hard. Maybe someone else
reading these messages will make a recommendation?
Regds Ric
I believe there is a spell checker that runs as a TSR and can be
called from withing Tapcis. Check the Tapcis forum.
Bruce, on spell checker that I know will run within Tapcis is Webster's New
World Combo. You can get more information in the Tapcis forum or send a
message to Combo's author Jim Korenthal 76004,2605. I think Korenthal
Associates has a section in the PCVENB forum for support of their shareware
program 4Print.
Thank you. I will contact Jim immediately for further details. My
spelling is terrible and Turbo Lightning is no longer available from
Borland.