Fw: [Lexicog] RE: End of print dictionaries at Macmillan

[Jimm GoodTracks]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: Gilles-Maurice de Schryver 
To: euralex at freelists.org ; DSNA at yahoogroups.com ; lexicographylist at yahoogroups.com ; asialex at freelists.org ; afrilex at freelists.org ; lexicografie at googlegroups.com ; ishll at lists.le.ac.uk 
Sent: Monday, November 05, 2012 5:00 AM
Subject: [Lexicog] RE: End of print dictionaries at Macmillan


  

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)





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 While printed reference books are out of date as soon they go on sale, an online dictionary can be kept fully up to date.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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