Demand for Electronic Dictionaries Revives

Electronic dictionaries, once thought to ‘disappear,’ are coming back to life.

Popular from the beginning of the 1990s, electronic dictionaries are outwardly similar to electronic organizers consisted of an LCD display and a keyboard where users enter the words to look up. From the latter half of the 1990s, however, there was a widespread perception in the industry that ‘the age of electronic dictionaries’ is gone, as electronic organizers became diverse with the function of dictionary, and smaller forms of PCs such as PDAs became more popular.

Nevertheless, manufacturing companies including Sharp and A-One Pro said that the demand is steadily rising.

In 2000, the market sold 120,000 electronic dictionaries, which amount to 24 billion won. However, the figure increased to 196,000 in 2001 and jumped over 100% to 510,000 last year. The market size will grow bigger to 700,000 units with the fierce competition, as this year, the Japanese Casio, which jumped into the market for the first time, is promoting aggressively with the budget of 2 billion won only for promotion. At present, Sharp is dominating the market of electronic dictionaries by more than 80%, followed by A-One Pro (15%). The reasons for the steady demand is that people still study language where they have no access to computers such as school libraries, reading rooms, and English institutes. In addition, those who want to see the results as soon as they enter words on the keyboards prefer electronic dictionaries to paper ones. The sales of paper dictionaries are decreasing and existing publishers including Donga and Kumsung are becoming more enthusiastic over sales of dictionary contents.

“It seems that there is no single device to replace the contents and speed of electronic dictionaries as good as four or five dictionaries of English-Korean, English-English, and Korean-English,” said President Park Won-sang of YooHak Solution, an English institute.

Seong-Yub Ra cpu@donga.com