Tools of Change: Liberating Dictionaries from Print

Tim O’Reilly enjoys a laugh with Oxford American dictionaries consulting editor Erin McKean after her closing keynote address at the first Tools of Change conference. “I don’t think dictionaries are truly books,” she declared in her delightfully contrarian lecture. “They don’t behave the way we expect books to behave.” But because books have become such a powerful metaphor for delivering information, she argued, that’s the format that dictionaries have been stuck in—although she embraced alternate delivery platforms, like her Treo, that contained a dictionary’s information in a truly ambient fashion until she needs to look something up. “I only look at the printed dictionary if I want to find a printer’s error,” she admitted.

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