bj @ checket

A warehouse full of dead trees

There is no doubt that things are increasingly dire for the traditional publishing world. And now comes word that the Oxford University Press is likely planning an electronic only publishing of the 3rd edition of the OED.

First, a few facts about the OED:

You read correctly that they are only on the 3rd version despite the fact that the OED was first published as early as 1888.
If you wanted to purchase a complete copy of the 2nd edition of the OED (all 20 volumes), it would set you back $949.00 and that doesn't include the shipping cost for all 135 lbs. of it. Or maybe you'd rather have the handsome leather-bound set for the low, low price of $6,295.00. Here's the link if you're interested in buying it. By contrast, you can get your foot in the door of the on-line edition for only $29.95 per month (automatically renewing, of course).
The OED contains around half a million words. But that's not the thing that makes it take up 20 whole volumes. That'd be the historical chronology of each word's usage beginning with the earliest recorded usage that the lexicographers can identify. In all, there are around 25 million literary quotations tracing the evolution of each word.
According to the article, the Oxford University Press says that they're still about a decade or more from finishing up the 3rd edition.
The story of the original edition of the OED inspired a book by Simon Winchester titled: "The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary." You should read it. Its great. In the first edition of the OED, 10's of thousands of entries were submitted by a man incarcerated in the Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum.
This word is actually in the OED: Peristeronic, which means "suggestive of pigeons." Go ahead...use it in a sentence. I dare you. This word, and many other funny ones like it can be found in Ammon Shea's book: "Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages."
If you search around to try to find the word with the longest definition in the OED, you'll find a lot of references to "set" which apparently has a definition that takes up 25 pages and around 10,000 words. However, it seems "set" was eclipsed by the words "make" and "put." But I can't find specific stats for either of them.

So, why did I start this blog entry? Oh, yeah. The end of print publishing. One of the things that gives me great joy is reading. And by reading, I mean printed books. To be fair, I haven't read a complete book on an electronic device so I don't actually have a frame of reference. I have "read" a few books from Audible and for whatever reason, they didn't stick with me like the ones I held in my hands. Maybe I'd be OK with a Kindle book. Who knows? Until I read an entire book on one, I really won't know. One thing I do know, however, is if we all switch to electronic books, how will we fill our real bookshelves? If I want to go back to something I read before to look up a chapter or a passage, will I just fire up my Kindle and search the library stored there? And what happens to all of those e-books? Even though they're made of paper and ink, I'm willing to bet that any printed book in my library would outlast a Kindle. What then? Where do my imaginary e-books go?

And I know this will sound extreme but in David Niven's and Jerry Pournelle's excellent book "Lucifer's Hammer" (published in 1977 when they were only just figuring out the huge impact that technology was going to have on us) they describe a scene in which one of the survivors of a civilization-ending comet impact spends several days individually wrapping every book in his library in Ziploc baggies and then burying them in a huge container to preserve the knowledge in them. I'm not sitting around wishing for a comet impact but if something like that were to happen, the internet isn't going to be much help when you need to learn how to set up a subsistence farm if you've never done it before.

Anyway, the tedious point I'm trying to make is I'm not looking forward to the end of the printed word just yet.

Posted 17 hours ago

0 Comments

World's smallest frog

This is just incredible. Almost unreal.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/08/photogalleries/100825-new-species-pea-size-frog-science-pictures/

So...two things. 1. apparently it's only one of the smallest frogs. Whatever. That thing is tiny. and 2. I fixed the link.

Posted 1 day ago

0 Comments

Even though I didn't watch the Emmy's...

I am ecstatic that Modern Family won the award for best comedy series! You really should be watching this show. It's hilarious.

Posted 1 day ago

0 Comments

Love these designs!

How one graphic designer might redesign US bank notes:

http://dowlingduncan.com/dowling-duncan-redesign-us-bank-notes/

(thanks to Daring Fireball for the link)

Posted 4 days ago

0 Comments

grisly...with a purpose

As soon as I saw the title to this article, I immediately thought of Mary Roach's excellent book "Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers." But someone in the comments section beat me to it.

Still, her book is a must-read.

And here's the article on cadavers used in auto crash testing that made me think of it...

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/38868527/ns/technology_and_science-innovation/

A quick check on Amazon shows another book by Mary Roach that I'd love to read - "Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife."

Posted 4 days ago

0 Comments

Apple in fresco

I couldn't help myself. This is what you get from someone with no talent and a fully licensed copy of Photoshop...

Posted 7 days ago

0 Comments

With apologies to my many great teachers

Most, if not all, of my teachers; the ones who were doing it because it was their actual job and the ones who were doing it for other reasons, made important impressions on me and some of their lessons are still with me today.

But I wish now that at some point someone had said to me what Mike Rowe says in this TED talk he gave a couple of years ago. Watch the video. It's very good and worth the 17 or so minutes it takes.

http://jakrose.posterous.com/celebrating-work-for-once-mike-rowe-ted-talk

Posted 7 days ago

0 Comments