Introduction to Survey

In a Survey 90% of the people responded they would want this improved dictionary.  Before showing this Survey, here are some introductory comments about this Survey. I wrote on a Survey page what the percentage response to each question was, so you can see the results of the Survey right on the Survey page. 

A representative Survey

About 1/3 of this Survey was done among people on Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) trains, a type of subway and over-ground train on special tracks in the San Francisco Bay Area.  BART also goes under the Bay.

About 1/3 of this Survey was done among students right at the University of California in Berkeley, California.  About 1/3 of this Survey was done among parents sitting around a children’s playground at Lake Merritt in Oakland.

So this is a rather representative survey, with about 1/3 each in wage earners, students, and parents.

People like convenience.

When I first contacted dictionary companies, this Survey was not yet done.  I did not see any real need for a survey, being that a much more convenient book dictionary would fairly obviously be something that people would want.  After all, people were using computer dictionaries for the main reason to get more convenience over ordinary book dictionaries.  And people disliked so much looking up alphabetical entries the regular way in telephone books, that people were telephoning to “Information” more often than they would use a telephone book.  Plus it is widely known in marketing anyway that people like convenience.

I did tell dictionary companies about the three above reasons to regard people would want a more convenient dictionary – computer dictionaries, telephoning to “Information,” and liking convenience anyway.  But dictionary companies declined to publish this improved dictionary.

After this Survey was completed, I mailed it to quite a few dictionary companies, and was rather surprised that they still would not publish this improved dictionary.

Why didn’t dictionary companies do their own survey? 

While a sampling of 80 people is not large, on the other hand I personally did not have the funds to finance a larger survey.  A dictionary company could do its own larger survey that would likely show that this improved dictionary would be a gargantuan best seller. 

It is not every day that a publisher gets the opportunity to have a gargantuan best seller.  Publishers put in much time, effort, and money looking for best sellers.  There is quite an involved process where publishers look for and decide on which books to publish.  My Survey justified a dictionary company paying out a few thousand dollars if it wanted more proof that the public would want this improved dictionary – – though it would be fairly obvious what the results of a much larger survey would be.  

The survey procedure

In the Survey, I just handed a clipboard to each person who agreed to do the Survey, and the person himself or herself read each question and wrote down his or her answers.

In questions 4, 5, and 6, each person answered what they thought about a dictionary where words could be found with 2 or 3 page turns, instead of the regular 6 to 7 page turns.  Those people had not yet seen this improved dictionary, and did not yet know that this improved dictionary existed.

In question #7 of the Survey, each person chose whatever word for me to look up, and I pulled out one of these dictionaries and looked up that word.  Each person saw how quickly each word was found.  After seeing how well this modified dictionary worked, 90% of the people surveyed wrote that they would want one of these.  The dictionary I used was one on which I had installed this index by hand.  How to install this index oneself onto a dictionary is shown in the longer video.

A gargantuan best seller

I might mention that it is not needed for 90% of the public to prefer a product for that product to be a success.  It would be enough if just small parts of the public wanted a product.  If just 5% or 10% of the public wanted this improved dictionary, that would be a massive best seller.  After all, many books on the best seller lists sell only a million copies, which is only about 4/10 (.4) of one percent of a population of 250,000,000.

So what is holding dictionary companies up from publishing this?  What is their concern to make income?  What is their concern to help education?

Do not waste time doing years of research on this.

Some people may recommend that besides doing a 10,000 person survey, that I should also first conduct some research over maybe a two year period on maybe 2,000 students how having this improved dictionary improved their educations.

But if I had $300,000 to do that, I instead could just pay to get 20,000 copies of this improved dictionary published – and this dictionary in regular use by itself would show how much this helps education.

Putting this “into committee” by doing big surveys and research and intellectualizing about this forever is just a way to avoid doing what is obviously needed.  With our dismally failing education system, this breakthrough should have been brought to the public years ago. 

After this is published, there will be many people interested in doing more research on this.  Kindly do not expect me as one individual with little time and little funds to do everything.  Other people can do other things related to this improved dictionary.

For instance, some anecdotal evidence on people liking this modified dictionary came from the son of a person who wrote the directions for the inside back cover of a dictionary.  At the time this son was about eleven years old.  This son was handed one of these modified dictionaries, and he read the directions and quickly learned how to use it.  After some days of using this modified dictionary, this son decided he did not want to use any other dictionary.