[Lexicog] RE: End of print dictionaries at Macmillan

[Gilles-Maurice de Schryver]

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

 

This is Breaking News indeed!

 

"Macmillan Dictionaries will no longer appear as physical books. The final
copies are rolling off the presses at this very moment, and from next year,
Macmillan Dictionary will be available only online."

http://www.macmillaneducation.com/MediaArticle.aspx?id=1778

 

For the past decade or so, we have all been expecting an announcement like
this from one of the major dictionary publishers, and I am happy to see that
the honour goes to Macmillan, a key player in the monolingual learner's
dictionary market for English. Finally getting rid of the paper constraints,
and starting to exploit the true power of the digital medium -- and to be
able to do just that -- is nothing less than a revolution. I predict that
the other major publishers will now also stop talking about what should be
done, to simply take the step and do it.

 

More info in Michael Rundell's post below.

 

Kind regards,

Gilles-Maurice de Schryver

President of AFRILEX and author of "Lexicographers' Dreams in the
Electronic-Dictionary Age" (IJL 16.2, 2003, free access here
<http://www.oxfordjournals.org/page/4646/3> )

 

 

From: euralex-bounce at freelists.org [mailto:euralex-bounce at freelists.org] On
Behalf Of Anne Dykstra
Sent: maandag 5 november 2012 10:11
To: euralex at freelists.org
Subject: [euralex] End of print dictionaries at Macmillan

 

Macmillan has announced that, from 2013, it will no longer be publishing
dictionaries in book form. It will focus instead on its expanding range of
digital resources. Michael Rundell, Editor-in-Chief of the Macmillan
dictionary list, sees this as both inevitable and entirely positive. He
regards the printed book as a very limiting medium, and increasingly out of
step with the way people look for information in the second decade of the
21st century. While printed reference books are out of date as soon they go
on sale, an online dictionary can be kept fully up to date. More than this,
the digital medium allows dictionary publishers to provide valuable
additional resources, like audio pronunciations, interactive games, and a
thesaurus function. As well as all these, Macmillan has a crowd-sourced
dictionary (the 'Open Dictionary') fed by users from all over the world, and
an active blog with four or five new posts every week on language-related
issues. Michael says he was struck by one of the findings reported at the
recent Euralex Congress in Gilles-Maurice de Schryver's plenary: his
analysis of papers in the Euralex archive showed that the word 'look up' had
declined in frequency and been overtaken by 'search'. This is the world that
dictionaries belong to now. For more details, see the post on this subject
in Macmillan's blog:  

http://www.macmillandictionaryblog.com/bye-print-dictionary.

 

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