As Houghton Mifflin Harcourt prepared to publish the fifth edition of its American Heritage Dictionary last November, a question arose: should the work go digital, or should the dictionary continue to be made available in print? The publisher enlisted a market research firm to survey 1,200 people about their dictionary usage. The results indicated that consumers still want print dictionaries—49% of those ages 18–30, 59% of those ages 31–45, and 73% of those 46 years or older expressed a preference for the printed page.

Says Bruce Nichols, senior v-p, adult and reference, "We are bullish on print dictionaries, and our research indicates that a sizable audience wants both a dictionary at home and a portable electronic version on a smartphone." Thus HMH's fifth edition will be available in print, but will also include a passkey code for a free download of a smartphone app that works on the iPad/iPhone/iPod and Android platforms. A free companion Web site will be available as well.

Such hybrid digital/print offerings are becoming the norm in the reference category. Most reference publishers believe, as Wiley publisher Cindy Kitchel puts it, "We are not seeing that print is dead, but rather that those seeking content want choices, whether it's getting material in print, in an app, on an e-reader, or through a Web site."

Megan Newman, editorial director of Avery Books, focuses on the digital side: "While in the fiction category, readers are certainly migrating toward e-books, the exodus has been far less rapid in nonfiction. For the most part, we offer our books across all e-platforms, which allows the reader to choose."

Avery is not alone. Most publishers make digital books available on a wide variety of platforms, and the reason is simple: the perfect e-book technology, especially one that marries well with reference, does not yet exist.

Andres Fleck-Nisbet, director of digital publishing at Workman, says, "The publishing industry is still waiting for the most popular digital formats and platforms to incorporate search functionality necessary to make e-book reference titles truly useful to readers. In the meantime, Workman is experimenting with ways to use existing platforms to drive sales to our print reference titles." One such attempt is the release of The Real World Guide to Coming Out solely as an e-book in May. This short digital work serves as a preview to Steven Petrow's Complete Gay & Lesbian Manners, due out on June 1. It will be available for free on every major e-book platform with an eye to generating interest and pre-pub orders for the longer book.

Bill Smith, director, digital partner development/constellation services, and director, domestic rights for the Perseus Book Group, says, "We generally do e-book editions in both EPub and .pdf and make them available to major e-book resellers and library wholesalers. For formatting purposes, .pdf provides consistency with the print edition; however, many consumers are opting for reflowable EPub for mobile consumption of digital reference, and we want to ensure that we're allowing for consumer choice. The developing app space is also particularly appealing for reference content for obvious reasons: apps allow for logical enhancements like full searchability and video, and elements that supplement the experience of the print edition. For example, our JFK: 50 Days historical reference app (Running Press/NBC/Vook), which tracked each hour of the Kennedy presidency, complete with NBC archival video, was an iTunes bestseller."

Also combining print and digital is Elsevier, which offers its major reference works as part of its SciVerse ScienceDirect database and also provides a print option for such titles as The Encyclopedia of Fish Physiology (July). Digital can be the subject of reference books, too; see Little, Brown's November paperback Digital Photography: A Basic Manual by Henry Horenstein.

Marcus Boggs, publisher of Scarecrow Press, the primary reference imprint of the Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, says, "We do not foresee the demise of the printed book and still consider it viable. But clearly digital publication has become a major opportunity. That's especially true for reference works, which you tend not to read continuously, cover to cover, and for which a search capacity—finding a discrete piece of information quickly—is particularly important. We continue to publish dictionaries, encyclopedias, handbooks, almanacs, for all of which demand persists. It seems to me that quality of the product is still the greater determinant of its success than a particular style or format."

Digital: Friend or Foe?

The ability to render books in digital format is not the only digital issue lighting up the reference category. The widespread availability of reference information on the Internet continues to threaten to make books in any format, if not obsolete, then less necessary. Yet readers do seem to be growing more aware that not everything online is reliable. Wiley's Kitchel speaks for many publishers when she says, "In many cases, free content online in more topic-driven areas competes directly with print and digital paid content. That said, sales of paid content remain strong in those areas where quality, trusted content can mean the difference between success and failure: passing a certification test, getting into graduate school, gaining college credit in an advanced placement course."

Oxford University Press editorial director Damon Zucca adds, "Reference has always been closely tied to research, and the fact that most research these days starts with a Google search doesn't change that. The proliferation of information sources online has made it more difficult and more time-consuming for researchers to find trustworthy reference content, particularly in the academic context where students, faculty, and educators need in-depth coverage of specialized topics."

Smith of the Perseus Book Group says the Internet has not eroded reference sales at all: "Certainly, consumers are increasingly reliant on the Web for their quick search needs. Yet in many ways the proliferation of unaccredited consumer reference content on the Internet has led readers to seek out more traditional and authoritative reference works—both in digital and print editions."

And Nancy Fish, marketing and publicity manager for Cleis Press, sees one niche where the Internet cannot compete with books. She explains, "While the snap and tunnel-vision of a digital word search has its practical values, word treasuries are a form of ‘slow reference' well-suited to the tangible, totemic format of a small, invitingly thumbable object." The house's Wordcatcher: An Odyssey into the World of Weird and Wonderful Words by Phil Cousineau, published in April 2010, sold 3,000 copies in a single day after NPR's Susan Stamberg called it a "must read" on Morning Edition. (It now has close to 10,000 copies in print.) Fish notes, however, that "the time of the large hardcover reference tome has passed. Not only are they too expensive for publishers to produce and consumers to purchase, but these books have been supplanted by the immediacy, ease-of-use, and often cost-free access to superb online reference materials."

Looking to the Future

The University of Virginia Press has created an entire electronic imprint, Rotunda, which both publishes original digital scholarship and digitizes texts in the humanities and social sciences. Works include the Presidential Recordings of Lyndon B. Johnson Digital Edition (building on a nine-volume set published by Norton) and Buildings of the United States Series, to be published in 2012, a project commissioned by the Society of Architectural Historians that will include extensive color illustrations.

Mark Saunders, electronic imprint manager at Rotunda and director of marketing for the press at large, says, "It has never seemed smart to us simply to force content into a digital box; instead we have selected material that benefits from rich XML tagging, the added value of audio, and other multimedia in the case of our Presidential Recordings Digital Editions, or geospatial information that we are adding to entries in the Buildings of the United States book series. High-quality conversion of print content to XML can be accomplished offshore at the rate of roughly 2,000 pages per week, but adding the metadata, deep tagging, and more images takes additional staff time and budget."

Oxford's Zucca, too, notes that his house is working on making digital better, but it's not giving up on print. He says, "For Oxford's reference program, digital priorities predominate, guiding our overall publishing priorities. Our primary focus is online publishing for core academic institutional markets worldwide. While our focus is on building the online publishing program, we still publish in print, and we have no immediate plans to switch to all digital. The downward trend in print sales of reference is unmistakable and irreversible, but we are selling books and we will continue to offer them as long as the demand is out there."

The Doctor Is in... the Book?

Books on medical subjects are perennially popular in the reference field and particularly adept at besting competition from the Internet. At DK, The Human Body Book has sold more than 900,000 copies since it was first published in 2007. In 2009 the house added The Human Brain Book (just under 100,000 copies sold), followed by The Complete Human Body, which has sold more than 50,000 copies since it was published in October. Coming in June: The Pregnant Body Book.

DK editorial director Nancy Ellwood says, "There's a wide audience for this latest book: doctors, nurses, students, pregnant women, really anyone who wants to learn the details about pregnancy from a knowledgeable, scientific source. And yes, those people can certainly find lots of information on the Internet, but it won't be as comprehensive, organized, or reliable as our book. And while you can click through images online, you simply can't find the high level of photography and custom illustration we commissioned for The Pregnant Body Book. It's a visual reference that brings the information together in an accessible way that the Internet cannot."

At Avery, says editorial director Megan Newman, Phyllis Balch's Prescription for Nutritional Healing, now in its fifth edition, "is an example of a book whose content has not been eclipsed by the Internet, because there is no one place on the Web where you can find such reliable material." While the press is exploring various app options for the book, the title is "hugely complicated," says Newman, so no specifics have been decided.

But at Perigee, publisher John Duff says that sales of its two major medical reference titles, the annual The Complete Guide to Prescription and Nonprescription Drugs and The Complete Guide to Symptoms, Illness, and Surgery, "have dropped over the years—I suspect as a result of consumers depending more on the Internet for this kind of information." The former title is available as an e-book, though the electronic version is being revised to include more of the formatting of the original print book and new features, such as cross-referenced links. The latter, however, is not yet available electronically because its extensive illustrations have made an e-book version a challenge.

What Did You Say Your Name Is?

To the uninitiated, reference may seem like a dry category, but many publishers perk things up with quirkily titled books. Below are three that caught PW's eye.

Better than Great: A Plenitudinous Compendium of Wallopingly Fresh Superlatives by Arthur Plotnik (Cleis Press/Viva Editions, June) collects 6,000 terms for describing the extraordinary. This funky thesaurus includes, for example, as synonyms for "beautiful," biscuit, body by Michelangelo, enshrinable, knock-down lovely, and pieridine (butterflylike). Associate publisher Brenda Knight, who acquired and edited Better, says, "For reference books especially, titles need to be ‘better than great,' instantly explaining the benefit of the book and making clear exactly what the reader will get."

Tell it to Josh Chetwynd, author of The Secret History of Balls: The Stories Behind the Things We Love to Catch, Whack, Throw, Kick, Bounce, and Bat (Perigee, May)—a title certain to make anyone look twice that covers sports paraphernalia from Australian Rules football to Wiffle Ball. Perigee editor Maria Gagliano says the book "will appeal to sports fans, history lovers, and trivia buffs of all stripes. Each ball's story uncovers the quirky history behind its sport that will pique the interest of readers well beyond sports lovers. The title speaks to the fact that these stories reveal so much about the people and cultures behind the balls themselves—there's a surprise behind every corner."

"Useless" is the word from two recent Skyhorse Press titles, says associate publisher Bill Wolfsthal: "Our two books, The Utterly, Completely, and Totally Useless Fact-O-Pedia [Jan.] and The Utterly, Completely, and Totally Useless History Fact-O-Pedia [May], both by Charlotte Lowe, follow a long tradition of taking serious subjects and making them fun. The Uncle John Bathroom Readers, Ben Schott's miscellany books, and books like them can become bestsellers. In a media age where books have to fight TV, the Internet, movies, and more for time and attention, reference books have to offer more than just information. They have to offer information that's fun to read and have to be great gifts."