Kernerman Dictionary News • Number 13 • June 2005
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If dictionaries are free, who will buy them?
If dictionaries are free, who will buy them? The
question looms over publishing houses like a slow-motion tsunami.
Dictionaries are now free, on the web and bundled with Microsoft Office and
other products, so where is the publishers’ income stream going to come from? Articles in the last four editions of this newsletter
have addressed the title question. Charles Levine [KDN9, 2001] opened
the debate in optimistic mode, seeing signs of growth in English-language
lexicography despite the web. Joseph Esposito’s response [KDN10, 2002] was
a: “grim vision … when I complained
about Microsoft bundling a spell checker, with its limited dictionary, into
Word ages ago, the techies I knew all laughed at me. Now that most of them
have burned through their venture capital after Microsoft "integrated"
the gist of their products into Windows, we all cry into our lattes
together.”
History: a dictionary in every household In the twentieth century, a number of European and North
American publishers occupied the fertile coastal strip of “a dictionary in
every household”. Dependable as the cycle of one generation growing up and
handing over to the next, it was a large and enviable market, in harmony with
the grand and noble agenda of universal education. To be sure, the coastal
strip was sometimes crowded with competitors, but the soil was good: there
were always more households to buy
dictionaries. They don’t need to buy them any more. There is no use lamenting the
lost market. It may disappear with varying speeds: as Esposito notes and
Levine confirms: “In the absence of growth, the
old business will be strained for capital, which will beget smaller
investments, which will in turn hasten the decline. In the short term, this
will redound to the benefit of market leaders, such as Merriam-Webster and
The market which is collapsing is the monolingual,
emblematic “dictionary-at-home” market (the role of which has always been
complex: status symbol for spelling, scrabble and – sometimes – schoolwork).
Different markets, notably the boom EFL one and bilinguals that people need
for travel and language-learning, have different trajectories. The future For the regular monolingual
centerpiece, away from that lush dictionary-in-each-household coastal strip,
what is there? The key lies in quality. Most free dictionaries are not
very good. Most people don’t care: a dictionary is a dictionary is a
dictionary, good or bad, and one is plenty. Some free ones are even quite
good; Esposito and Levine note the quality of the Encarta dictionary,
possibly the first of a new breed of market-swamping, “good-enough”
dictionaries. But the minority of people for whom language is their
trade do care. They are the translators and
academics, etc. The numbers are tiny compared to the golden age but, in this,
dictionary publishing is undergoing the same transformation as many other
markets with the advent of the internet: the market fractures,
and where there were a small number of products selling to millions, there
are now millions of products – selling far smaller numbers – to billions. The
up side is that customers can be found all over the globe and, once found, they are the right customers for the product so are
likely to be willing to spend more. The nice thing about this is that making good
dictionaries, as opposed to bad ones, is what every lexicographer wants to
do. There is usually tension between lexicographer and publisher – better vs
cheaper – and the change in the market gives more weight to the
lexicographer’s case. While Esposito despairs at the traditional publishers
being left “to focus on the scraps Microsoft leaves on the floor”, we note
that the market for the most accurate, the most consistent and the most
current account of a language (or source-target pair) is far more than a
scrap. Of course, language professionals will be online.
Lexicographically, this is exciting as it means the dictionary can be far
better than any that went before: it is not constrained by space, and we can
open our vision to the dictionary as an object integrated with the underlying
corpus resources (as in Word Sketches1). But that is a different
topic: here, our concern is for income streams. Many of the language professionals are associated with
universities and libraries. They are traditional customers for dictionaries,
have substantial budgets, and, with physical space ever at a premium, are
often enthusiastic about services which do not incur extra demands on space
or personnel. For example, Oxford Reference Online2 is an
online subscription service, sold almost exclusively as a site licence to
institutions, incorporating a wide range of Oxford University Press’s
reference materials. It is very successful. Extensions which focus on
language resources are planned. Of course, OUP has a wonderful brand, and has
so many resources that it is able to offer a very broad resource, a
one-stop-shop which is attractive to libraries. Others probably need to
assemble into consortia (branding according to the best-known brand in each
market). It is a route out of the path of the tsunami. Dictionaries for computers? All of the above is about
dictionaries for people to use. Esposito, writing in 2002, says “The
real game for Microsoft is using lexical databases within computer
algorithms, as in natural-language processing.” Parish, too, stresses that Microsoft is an energetic
customer for dictionaries for NLP (aka Language Technology, Computational
Linguistics). As an NLP researcher, I’m a little sanguine here. To be sure,
most NLP applications need dictionaries as inputs. In the short term most
will probably be derived from dictionaries as we know them, where there are
good ones available at reasonable cost. But consider eg, Prinsloo and de
Schryver’s spellcheckers for African languages3. The wordlists are
corpus derived. Across NLP, researchers are finding ways of solving
problems using corpora. While high-quality, well-structured hand-crafted
resources currently support technologies that corpus-derived resources don’t,
the list is shrinking. Even three years ago, Esposito’s remarks looked right,
but now, as NLP has changed, and while it may often be a short-term
convenience for Microsoft and others to take publishers’ resources, it is not
an income stream for the long term. While post-editing corpus-derived
resources is a job that will need doing for some time yet, it is less than a
glorious future for the grand old names of dictionary publishing.
Notes 1 http://www.sketchengine.co.uk
2 http://www.oxfordreference.com
3 D.J. Prinsloo and G-M de Schryver 2003. Non-word error
detection in current South African spellcheckers. Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies 21/4
(Special issue on 'Human Language Technology in Further comments Joseph Esposito This is a very good article and I am delighted to have
read it. A few comments, but all in the spirit of appreciation: First, I do not and did not despair at the demise of Second, the specialized dictionaries noted in the piece
are precisely what I envisioned as the "crumbs" Microsoft would
leave behind. As Bill Gates said apropos Sun Microsystems, you can only
climb up that tree so far. Third, the economic success of Oxford Reference Online
is arguable. It's a good idea; if it generates a positive contibution to
overhead (as I suspect it does), it's a very good
idea. But it is not a sustaining idea. Library subscriptions cannot
support the overall editorial and technical infrastructure of OUP's
dictionary efforts. Other revenue streams must chip in, and those
revenue streams are drying up. Fourth, new product development (of innovative products,
of course) is the answer to the business problems – but when is that not the
case? The problem for the current crop of dictionary-makers is that the
new products require additional investment, but the old products require
ongoing maintenance. So the total cost of being in the business continues to
rise, even as the market becomes more specialized. Finally, and this is a matter of semantics, when I said
that dictionaries would find a market in computational linguistics, I did not
mean the current crop of general-interest dictionaries but new forms of
dictionaries, such as the ones derived from algorithmically generated
corpora. The real point here is that there is a future for dictionaries,
but there is no future for lexicographers. That's why we have machines. The
future is only trivially post-print; more fundamentally, it is
post-human. Do I despair? You could have asked that question of Charles Levine More than two decades into the digital revolution, and
more than one decade into the Internet revolution, Adam Kilgarriff's
assertion that the monolingual dictionary market is collapsing remains
hyperbole – at least from the perspective of the
Kilgarriff I hope Esposito's not right about the shrinking market
failing to sustain lexicograph*ers* (as no-one will be investing in it),
though I must admit there is a grim logic to what he says.
Joseph J. Esposito, ‘Dictionaries, another Netscape?’, Kernerman Dictionary News, Number 10, July 2002. Charles M. Levine, The Coming Boom in English Lexicography – Reconsidered (Part Two), Kernerman Dictionary News, Number 11, July 2003. Julian Parish, Microsoft and Dictionary Makers: Defining
Partnerships, Kernerman
Dictionary News, Number 12, July 2004.
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