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E-PUBLISHING:

E-Reference Revolution
Oxford University Press launch the biggest general
knowledge website on the Net

LAUNCHED IN MARCH, Oxford Reference Online has made 100 reference titles available via the Internet, including the Concise English Dictionary, Fowler's Modern English, A Dictionary of Economics, and Who's Who. They plan to eventually expand this to 300 volumes, including the Popular Oxford Companions series. This will make it the largest reference source on the Internet, almost three times larger than the Encyclopedia Britannica and twice the size of the current record holder, the 60-million words of the full Oxford English Dictionary.

"It will offer a new global standard for reference across the Internet, and in the process make accessible Oxford's massive reference assets," says Rob Scriven, managing editor of Oxford Dictionaries.

In common with other major reference and scholarly journal publishers, the core technology being used to publish the material online is XML, the computer language that allows content to be "re-purposed", re-organized, or re-formatted, at the click of a mouse.

Sadly for the general public, Oxford Reference Online will only be available by annual subscription to schools, academia, Government offices, and businesses worldwide. Subscription fees range from $250 for a school and $3,000 for a large university.

Money can be made in e-publishing
The site, which cost over $1.5-million to build, was developed largely due to the phenomenal success of the Oxford English Dictionary site, which (interestingly) boosted sales of the printed version, and is set to become a profitable venture in its own right later this year. This latest project will further test Oxford University Press' (OUP) belief that it is possible to make money in e-publishing: The plan for Oxford Reference Online is that it reaches break-even point in three years and becomes profitable in year four.

But will it succeed? After all, doom and gloom has dogged the e-publishing industry for a couple of years - ever since analysts (wrongly) predicted the "end of the printed word." The truth is, they were really referring to the bestseller market in e-books, which failed to take off due to lack of portability and a general dislike of reading lengthy tomes on a monitor screen. Paperbacks, it seems, are by far the best format for reading potboilers.

Reference books, however, are a different animal altogether and OUP are banking on the idea that reference publishing is a niche market that lends itself very well to the Internet. The odds look good; after all, users of reference books don't read whole tomes, they pull out chunks of information or simply check facts. This means that, unlike potboiler readers, they're happy to access reference works on a PC or laptop. It forms part of their daily work or study, and so the use of a dedicated reading device doesn't come into it - as comfort is not a priority.

The other key advantages of Oxford Reference Online include the ability to regularly update titles and publish new editions - very useful when it comes to volumes of statistics, and scientific, educational, or business titles. In comparison, keeping a printed reference collection up-to-date is a costly, not to mention space consuming, business.

Publishing texts online is good for the user too: It allows them to perform word searches across knowledge bases and get results from a variety of information resources, while also permitting narrow single-volume searches.

Beats free web reference sources
Put together, all these advantages make Oxford Reference Online look like a strong Internet business model. Not only does the online format offer important advantages over print and CD-ROM, but the target users are organizations that have a need and a budget to fulfill that need.

Oxford University Press are also confident that their latest Internet publishing venture will be successful because of the reputation of its brand. So much information on the Web is published without verification. Whereas every Oxford reference work is written by experts and cross-checked thoroughly. This, they believe, will make it a market leader. As Rob Scriven, managing editor of Oxford Dictionaries says: "Oxford Reference Online offers reference material that is of the highest quality. It is easily searchable with the ability to cross-search from any word. And it's all in one location. Nothing similar is offered free on the Web."

4/9/2002
DCLnews Editorial

Read more e-publishing related articles at DCL Library

Comments and correspondence to: jshreeve@dclab.com

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