Dictionary Publishers Going Digital
A Low Margin Business Sees Profits on the Web
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
logomachy -- n. an argument about
words -- is brewing on the Web.
Houghton Mifflin plans to publish the
fourth edition of the American Heritage
dictionary next month, the volume's first
major overhaul in eight years. The new
edition is full of changes sure to arouse
lexicographers -- color illustrations, notes
on slang and a new appendix describing
Semitic as well as Indo-European roots.
But what has the publisher most excited
is happening outside the covers, as Houghton Mifflin hustles to sell electronic versions of its dictionary for inclusion in other
companies' software, Web sites and digital
publications.
Houghton Mifflin is not alone. Its major
rivals -- most notably Merriam-Webster
and Microsoft's year-old Encarta dictionary -- are all stepping up their digital
dictionary efforts to tap an increasingly
lucrative market, setting up a business
contest that philologists say will also affect
the way Americans use English.
Electronic novels may be making headlines these days, but electronic dictionaries
are actually making money. At Houghton
Mifflin, digital dictionary licensing is expected to account for more than $1 million
in profit this year, more than 10 percent of
the earnings from the company's trade and
reference division, according to Wendy
Strothman, the division's publisher.
Stifled for years by low margins and flat
sales, publishers are salivating over digital
licensing as a new source of revenue
growth and promoting new features like
audible pronunciations. But word scholars
worry that the new pressures of the online
market may end up favoring well-connected or well-positioned dictionaries -- some
sniffingly cite Microsoft's Encarta -- over
more authoritative lexicons.
Many lexicographers initially saw the
advent of the Internet as a terrific new tool,
especially because it made possible electronic texts of nearly infinite length. That
impulse inspired the Oxford University
Press, for example, to revise its 20-volume
Oxford English Dictionary for the first
time since its completion in 1928.
A new online version of the O.E.D. is
available to subscribers for fees starting at
$550 a year. Researchers are posting the
revisions and additions online in stages,
and they expect to finish the alphabet in
about 40 volumes around 2010.
Oxford University Press has not yet decided if it will
publish a new printed version, too, said
Jesse Sheidlower, its American editor.
The Internet also enables rival dictionary compilers to share a common digital
"corpus," or archive of usage samples. Inspired by the British National Corpus that
was established in 1993, a group of publishers and linguists based in New York is
raising financing and gathering material to
build an American National Corpus of 100
million words in texts of all kinds, including
transcript, newspapers and novels.
But the American National Corpus has
yet to win help from many of the nation's big
dictionary publishers, who would stand to
lose the advantage of their own proprietary
archives. "We think we have our needs
pretty well served," said John Morse, president and publisher of the Merriam-Webster,
the United States's oldest and best-selling
dictionary, with an arhive of more than 15
million citations.
The World Wide Web is also a gold mine
for linguistic research. For the first time,
scholars can trace the infancy of new words
as they bubble up from narrow subcultures
through online discussion groups and eventually into general use, said Michael Adams,
a professor at Albright College in Pennsylvania and editor of the journal Dictionaries.
Professor Adams recently published a
study of new coinages from the television
show "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" --
"slayage" and many other -age formations,
for example -- tracking their progress from
teenage fans' Web sites to magazines like
Mademoiselle. He argues that Buffy has
also spawned novel uses of "much," as in
"pathetic much?," "morbid much?" or
"Having issues much?"
But Microsoft's Encarta dictionary, billed
as the first lexicon for the digital age, has
some lexicographers shaking their heads,
partly because they worry that it could
indeed be the dictionary of the future.
The idea for the Encarta was born in the
early 1990's, when Nigel Newton, chief executive of the British publishing house
Bloomsbury, wrote a letter to William H.
Gates, proposing to create a dictionary of
"world English."
| |
|
The Web is seen as a
gold mine for linguistic
research.
| |
| |
At the time, Microsoft was paying Houghton Mifflin to license online versions of its
American Heritage dictionary to use in Microsoft's spell-checking software and to
bundle with its Encarta digital encyclopedia. Why pay Houghton Mifflin, Mr. Newton
suggested, when the two companies could
build a wordbook of their own? Bloomsbury
developed the dictionary, selling international digital rights to Microsoft and the
American rights to Holtzbrinck's St. Martins Press.
The new venture faced long odds in bookstores. Most American consumers traditionally want a red dictionary with the name
Webster on the cover -- as in Merriam-Webster, Random House's Webster's, and
IDG Books's Webster's New World, says
John Sargent, president of Holtzbrinck's
American operations.
But the new dictionary's publishers are
betting that Microsoft's commanding position in the software market can make Encarta's name and black cover even more
ubiquitous. "Our thinking was that, given its
use in Microsoft software, the Encarta
brand would over time become the leading
reference brand," Mr. Sargent said. The
electronic version is available for sale with
some Microsoft software or for free at
www.encarta.com
The possibility that Encarta will, in fact,
become the new Webster is precisely what
is bothering many linguists. In a forthcoming review in Dictionaries, Sidney I. Landau,
author of "Dictionaries: The Art & Craft of
Lexicography," roundly pans Encarta's
"cumbersome, repetitious and inconsistent
style" and especially what he sees as its
excessive political correctness.
The word "Indian," an example Mr. Landau notes, is described in other dictionaries
as potentially insensitive but also widely
used among Native Americans and inextricably woven into terms like "Indian summer." The Encarta issues a blanket condemnation, calling the term "offensive"
several times. In a few cases, the Encarta
Web site even interrupts the viewer with a
"language advisory" before even displaying
a potentially offensive word, as if it were a
lewd movie. Such labels, Mr. Landau says,
reverse most lexicographers' understanding of their job -- to report in neutral terms
the changing shape of the language.
Professor Adams, another Encarta critic,
worries that Encarta will succeed depite its
flaws and at the expense of its rivals. "The
problem is that if they don't put out the best
possible dictionary, because of the access
they have through the Microsoft software,
they could very well depress the sales of the
four major publishers," said Mr. Adams,
who has worked as a consultant to American Heritage. "Good dictionaries would disappear, and we would be left with an inferior
dictionary."
Microsoft and its partners dismiss the
criticism as predictable nitpicking. Every
new or different dictionary has met a similar response from professional lexicographers, said Mr. Sargent of Holtzbrinck.
Houghton Mifflin, Microsoft's previous
digital dictionary supplier, was the publisher with the most to lose from the Encarta
dictionary, which Microsoft this year began
using instead of the American Heritage. But
Ms. Strothman of Houghton Mifflin said that
new digital licensing deals had "more than
made up for the loss of that revenue
stream."
She said Houghton Mifflin prepares customized versions of its digital database for a
variety of clients, seeking to capitalize on
the recent interest in electronic publishing
by embedding its dictionary in electronic
books or reading software. Readers can look
up any word with a click.
When half a million fans downloaded copies of Stephen King's electronic novella
"Riding the Bullet" in March, for example,
some of the software programs for displaying it included a digital version of the American Heritage dictionary, and Houghton
Mifflin received a small royalty on each.
This fall, the digital publisher netLibrary
will begin including American Heritage dictionaries with its e-books, paying a sliding
scale fee for its use. (Microsoft's new Reader software, however, includes a version of
Encarta.)
A number of Web sites, including
www.dictionary.com, have even paid
Houghton Mifflin for use of its digital dictionary to provide free spellings and definitions on the Web, hoping to attract viewers
and sell advertising. "They are welcome to
do that, but our content costs us money and
we want to get paid for it," Ms. Strothman
said. "What puzzles me is why our competitors put their own dictionaries up on the
Web for free." Houghton Mifflin sells its
dictionary on CD-ROM, but does not put it
on a Web site of its own.
That position has cost the company some
business. Paul J. J. Payack, chief executive
of the newly formed company yourDictionary.com, initially favored licensing American Heritage, he says, because he liked its
etymologies and simple definitions. But he
did not like Houghton Mifflin's licensing-only strategy. He wanted a dictionary that
would bolster his brand by building its own,
so he struck a deal with Merriam-Webster.
Merriam-Webster has taken a radically
different tack from American Heritage, giving its dictionary away for free on its own
Web site (www.m-w.com) while at the same
time trying to license it to whomever it
could, including America Online and the
hand-held computer maker Franklin Electronic Publishers, among others. Recently,
it also managed to strike a deal to display its
Web site on Palm devices.
"Unlike Houghton Mifflin, we are just a
dictionary publisher," said Mr. Morse of
Merriam-Webster. "We aim mainly to promote the brand."
The main Merriam-Webster Web site and
a related site for children offer word games
and offers a free word-of-the-day e-mail
with usage and etymology tips. Mr. Morse
said the site was now getting about 20
million page views a month, at a rate of
about 50,000 look-ups an hour during the
middle of the day.
Merriam-Webster also tracks which
words users look up for guidance in making
revisions. This month's hot word: "chutzpah," spurred by news coverage of vice
presidential candidate Joseph I. Lieberman.
But not all lexicographers are happy
about the proliferation of Merriam-Webster's definitions online, either. "The Merriam-Webster is fantastic but least suited
for most people who use it," said Jesse
Sheidlower, the American editor of the Oxford English Dictionary. "Its definitions are
much more complicated and more difficult
than the other major dictionaries. The other
dictionaries are accurate, and you can use
them without going nuts."
Related Sites
These sites are not part of The New York Times on the Web, and The Times has no control over their content or availability.
