LONG comment re "Rerun of a bad movie; Nail jelly to the wall"

[Frank Abate]

The point that Fred S makes below in reply to something Barry P asked is a
very important one re understanding how ref publications are compiled, and
how they must be compiled in order to be both useful to the majority of
potential users AND in order to ever get published in a reasonable time
period.  All publishers, even university presses, have budgets for their
individual titles, and hope, with the exception of monographs and such, to
make some money on each book, even if just a little.  If this were not the
case, there would be no ref books published at all, at least no good ones --
the ones with sound, recent research and professional editing.

There are many ref pubs in the public domain, either very old and
out-of-copyright (like an old edition (1911 I think) of Roget's Thesaurus,
and miscellaneous dictionaries that one can access online, from lots of
websites) or given away by the compiler because the work has little or no
commercial value or a minuscule market (like a lot of bilingual dicts where
the two languages covered are "exotic").  For this reason, the web is
littered with a lot of very bad reference data -- a ton of data, many tons,
but most of it out-of-date, of limited interest, or unprofessionally done
(there are exceptions).  Unfortunately, the ubiquity and abundance of this
data deceives the casual or inexperienced web user.  Sure, there is a LOT of
ref data on the web, but the great, great majority of the free stuff is
virtually worthless, IMHO.  I do not count the e-pubs that one pays for,
such as OED Online, MW3 Online, xreferplus, and other subscription services.
I also do not count the wealth of "free" government data available online,
such as the GNIS from USGS (geographic names) or the CIA World Factbook.
(For the govt data, some of which is dynamite stuff, "free" really means
"already paid for by tax dollars".)

The argument that "Information wants to be free" is a nice idealistic one,
but is a pipe dream.  As the computer guru Ted Nelson once said, people
write books for one of only two reasons -- profit or glory.  If one
considers that those are the prime motivations (and I agree that they are;
there are some altruistic people around who are giving stuff away, but most
folks who edit ref pubs have to buy groceries, too), then one can see why
information cannot and will never be absolutely free -- for good, freshly
researched, and professionally edited ref data, you gotta pay the workers.
There is no way around that, not that I know of.

One can envision a different kind of publishing model where the ref editors
get paid by the sale of advertising or some such -- the way in which
commercial TV and radio is "free" in the USA, and the way that many dot-coms
give stuff away (or used to, till they dot-bombed because almost nobody
looks at online ads).  But aside from that kind of model, I'm afraid that
information -- at least good, solid reference data -- will NEVER be free.

Thus he spoke . . .

Frank Abate

*******************************

yOn Wed, 22 Jan 2003 Bapopik at AOL.COM wrote:

>    Two presidential phrases.  What does Fred Shapiro have?

This question is a good excuse for me to clarify a point.  Barry's
postings sometimes seem to envision that the Yale Dictionary of Quotations
is going to cover every phrase or expression ever uttered; this
expectation parallels his apparent expectation that the OED should cover
every term ever uttered in English or any other language.  In fact, my
book will be limited to more significant quotations, just as every
real-world reference book has to be limited in various ways.  It would
never occur to me that "rerun of a bad movie" or "nail jelly to the wall"
would be significant enough for me to cover.

In a way I hate to articulate the above, because Barry posts such great
stuff in furtherance of his unlimited vision of inclusiveness and I
don't want to discourage him, but I don't want unrealistic expectations to
grow up with regard to my book.

Please keep up the great work, Barry!

Fred Shapiro


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Fred R. Shapiro                             Editor
Associate Librarian for Collections and     YALE DICTIONARY OF QUOTATIONS
  Access and Lecturer in Legal Research     Yale University Press,
Yale Law School                             forthcoming
e-mail: fred.shapiro at yale.edu               http://quotationdictionary.com
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