Thoroughly mixed feelings here. As computer-geeky as I am, I have literally made use of my dead-tree encyclopaedia exactly once in the last seven years[1], so I would have a very hard time justifying to anyone why they should spend money on buying anything like that.<p>On the other hand, I do actually still have the encyclopaedia on my bookshelves, and I would never want to give that up. I'm fairly young (32) but old enough to have been raised believing that any household with even the pretensions of education simply <i>must</i> have an encyclopaedia on its bookshelf (and visible, at that). Having it in physical form has an almost talismanic value.<p>So yeah. I'd kind of love to have a dead-tree OED on my shelves. But I'd rarely use it and it's pretty hard to justify the cost in any remotely rational terms.<p>[1]It was during an internet outage and I wanted to know the latitude of southern Scotland, so that I could calculate roughly when sunrise would be in mid-December, because this turned out to be plot-relevant in a suspense novel I was reading at the time. The whole enterprise was outrageously geeky.
How about publishing it as a physical, digital artifact? An open-hardware eBook reader, preloaded with the unabridged OED in an open format, would be of about equivalent archival and academic value. You could even include a dead-tree technical manual and format spec in the box, to ensure that you could boot it up and get it running again in a few hundred years.
Printed books are a thing of the past, you'll get used to it.<p>Yes, I'm talking about books in general. Dictionaries and encyclopedias are just the extreme cases where the sheer size makes the advantages (especially searchability and linking) of electronic media so obvious (relative to the disadvantages) that it's already killing the paper versions. Most other kinds of printed books will follow sooner or later.<p>All this blah-blah about "haptic experiences" ist just nostalgia mixed with (perfectly legitimate) concerns about the usability of electronic media available today - but there's almost limitless room for improvement there, while paper books have none.
I have a hard-copy OED in the full-size edition. I always use online dictionaries because I don't much care about etymology (which is the OED specialty), and because looking words up manually is tedious. If you're thinking about getting one, maybe start with the unabridged Webster's third and see how it goes?
A much more thorough discussion of this cultural icon than yesterday's Telegraph article (<a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1645180" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1645180</a>), so excuse me for supporting it with a rehash of my comment there -<p>The OED is the #1 item on my geek to-buy list. Even as a bespoke item (possibly more than the $1600 mentioned here) I hope the 20+ volume edition of OED3 is ultimately available. I may be able to justify the expense in another decade, when it's due for completion.
Regarding the dictionaries it's much more easier to use them in electronic form. Even when reading normal books I'm sometimes trying to "search" a word in a text :)