This isn’t enshittification, it was always a paid service. The extortionate price is aimed at universities and is sadly typical for anglophone academic pricings.
Anyway, OED is useful for scholarly purposes. Most users need a normal, smaller dictionary, not OED-level of detail. That’s fulfilled by dicts such as Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate edition (at merriam-webster.com) and Oxford Dictionary of English (yes that’s different from Oxford English Dictionary).
If you really need OED, you can pirate the 2nd edition, since it was published as a program on CD. It’s on Rutracker, IIRC. Let me know if you can’t find it.
Paid products can be enshittified. Also, its not just the quality of products that are getting enshittified but the concept of ownership over usage and access to digital data.
Slowly raising sub rates with that boiling frog tek.
No longer providing means to purchase local copies of data on a CD-ROM when you did before, just to pigeon-hole buyers down a subscription only access to the cloud.
Not offering a one time lifetime subscription in your sub-only model.
It used to be that you bought something and owned it physically or at least owned a private copy of the data that could be cracked/ stripped of DRM so you could truly freely own and distribute. Now they all want to be digital landlords where you own nothing and pay a little more each month through the good old boiling frog while pinning price increases on inflation. The mid-term result is a 100$/year to rent out digital access to a dictionary when before you could buy a cd copy.
Also, I don’t buy the “academic quality things should be incredibly expensive because its meant for scholars and university libraries” argument. Fuck that grift man. I know server infrastructure. It cost less to update a database or serve thousands of visitors than you might think especially for simple database lookups sent through https.
It also cost practically nothing to distribute a digital file. So, Free digital access to educational and reference materials output by universities realistically should be a right in any sane society. Im sure Oxford University gets enough tax breaks and gov subsidy they could do it without impacting the stock holders precious quarterly figures. That entire 12 volume OED set + SOED takes up 500mb and can be fit on every modern tablet and phone. It sure as hell could be fit on a CD ROM years ago when they made that. The only reason its not is greed and maybe the dopamine rush scholars get from filtering the plebs.
Also, I don’t buy the “academic quality things should be incredibly expensive because its meant for scholars and university libraries” argument.
You don’t have to buy it, because I didn’t use the argument and never would.
It cost less to update a database or serve thousands of visitors than you might think especially for simple database lookups sent through https.
If you think OED’s expenses can be boiled down to updating the database and keeping the site online, it means you still don’t understand what OED is and how it is produced.
I get the impression you’re primarily looking to be infuriated (perhaps appropriate given the community, but still) rather than to talk about this seriously.
Well, you can use it to check spellings too. Medieval and early modern spellings, even. Sometimes when seeing pedantic people online correcting others’ spellings, I used to check OED and find old texts where the “misspelling” existed normally. Ideally the first editions of Shakespeare, with forms such as “scornfull” instead of scornful, etc. So the pedants would either have to admit it’s not such a big mistake, or Shakespeare was illiterate too.
Anyway, yeah it’s drama for its own sake.
OTOH the price is too high, but that’s normal for English academic publications in general. It’s a very rotten market that’s not really aimed at individual buyers but at university libraries.
This isn’t enshittification, it was always a paid service. The extortionate price is aimed at universities and is sadly typical for anglophone academic pricings.
Anyway, OED is useful for scholarly purposes. Most users need a normal, smaller dictionary, not OED-level of detail. That’s fulfilled by dicts such as Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate edition (at merriam-webster.com) and Oxford Dictionary of English (yes that’s different from Oxford English Dictionary).
If you really need OED, you can pirate the 2nd edition, since it was published as a program on CD. It’s on Rutracker, IIRC. Let me know if you can’t find it.
Paid products can be enshittified. Also, its not just the quality of products that are getting enshittified but the concept of ownership over usage and access to digital data.
Slowly raising sub rates with that boiling frog tek.
No longer providing means to purchase local copies of data on a CD-ROM when you did before, just to pigeon-hole buyers down a subscription only access to the cloud.
Not offering a one time lifetime subscription in your sub-only model.
It used to be that you bought something and owned it physically or at least owned a private copy of the data that could be cracked/ stripped of DRM so you could truly freely own and distribute. Now they all want to be digital landlords where you own nothing and pay a little more each month through the good old boiling frog while pinning price increases on inflation. The mid-term result is a 100$/year to rent out digital access to a dictionary when before you could buy a cd copy.
Also, I don’t buy the “academic quality things should be incredibly expensive because its meant for scholars and university libraries” argument. Fuck that grift man. I know server infrastructure. It cost less to update a database or serve thousands of visitors than you might think especially for simple database lookups sent through https.
It also cost practically nothing to distribute a digital file. So, Free digital access to educational and reference materials output by universities realistically should be a right in any sane society. Im sure Oxford University gets enough tax breaks and gov subsidy they could do it without impacting the stock holders precious quarterly figures. That entire 12 volume OED set + SOED takes up 500mb and can be fit on every modern tablet and phone. It sure as hell could be fit on a CD ROM years ago when they made that. The only reason its not is greed and maybe the dopamine rush scholars get from filtering the plebs.
You don’t have to buy it, because I didn’t use the argument and never would.
If you think OED’s expenses can be boiled down to updating the database and keeping the site online, it means you still don’t understand what OED is and how it is produced.
I get the impression you’re primarily looking to be infuriated (perhaps appropriate given the community, but still) rather than to talk about this seriously.
I feel like the people complaining here have no idea how much work is involved in compiling and maintaining the OED.
This is a full reference of the English language intended for academics and professional contexts, not just a place to check spelling.
Well, you can use it to check spellings too. Medieval and early modern spellings, even. Sometimes when seeing pedantic people online correcting others’ spellings, I used to check OED and find old texts where the “misspelling” existed normally. Ideally the first editions of Shakespeare, with forms such as “scornfull” instead of scornful, etc. So the pedants would either have to admit it’s not such a big mistake, or Shakespeare was illiterate too.
Anyway, yeah it’s drama for its own sake.
OTOH the price is too high, but that’s normal for English academic publications in general. It’s a very rotten market that’s not really aimed at individual buyers but at university libraries.
Aren’t there a bunch of old professors in some old English university doing that, paid by the government?
I’m so disappointed 😞