A giant reference work which dwarfs any book in history will start to take shape in March, in a project seen as a vote of confidence in paid-for services on the internet.
Oxford University Press is putting hundreds of its dictionaries, mini-encyclopaedias and companions on a subscription website expected to total 130m words.
The site, Oxford Reference Online, will be launched with a core of more than 100 titles including the Concise English Dictionary, Fowler's Modern English Usage and Who's Who in the 20th Century.
It will soon expand to 300 digitised volumes, which are to include star titles like the Oxford companions to English literature and food.
This will make it the biggest general knowledge source on the web, almost three times vaster than the 44m word Encyclopaedia Britannica and more than twice as big as the internet's biggest existing reference site, which until now was the OUP's own 60m word text of the full Oxford English Dictionary.
David Swarbrick, the director of the OUP project, said yesterday: "We do think it is possible to make money on the internet. We hope to break even in three years and be making a profit in four."
The new mega-website is a result of the success of the electronic Oxford English Dictionary site, which was started two years amid warnings that it would merely undermine sales of the 20 volume print dictionary and supply further proof that paid-for internet services cannot make a profit.
Instead, hundreds of institutions serving millions of users across the world, particularly in the United States, have all renewed their subscriptions within the last three months, leading to forecasts that the site will shortly move into profit. Its gross revenue so far is more than £1m. Sales of the print dictionary have risen since the launch of the website.
Last year the US-run Encyclopaedia Britannica website, which was initially run on the then conventional model of a free service backed by advertising, introduced charges for access to detailed entries.
The more ambitious reference project sprang from OUP's attempt to interest the American market of libraries, schools and universities in a proposed literature website. "But we found their real interest and excitement was in their idea of a reference website," said Mr Swarbrick.
The OUP is trading heavily on its editors' reputation for fact checking and in-depth knowledge, in contrast to what a spokeswoman called "so much unchecked information on the internet". So far 200-300 institutions have signed up to try the site, which has cost more than £1m to set up.
Its core books will include dictionaries of art, astronomy, computing, dance, economics, grammar, euphemisms, law, mathematics, medicine, music, philosophy, place names, plant sciences, Shakespeare, weather and zoology.
Annual subscriptions will range from £175 for a school and £500 for a single library, FE college or small university, to £2,500 for a large university.
No subscriptions will initially be on offer to individuals, because of fears of swamping the site. However, Oxford has been impertinently beaten to the tape by a smaller rival.
British company xref.com, which is run by an ex-OUP employee, Adam Hodgkin, launched a subscription website on December 4 drawing on 100 reference books from other publishers.
Xref.com's charges are higher, at £375 for schools, £500 for FE colleges and £1,000 for institutions of up to 2,500 but yesterday its marketing director, Daryl Rayner, said one of its advantages over OUP was in its diversity of good publishers. These include Grove, Penguin, Bloomsbury and Columbia.
Mr Swarbrick of OUP said: "We take their competition seriously, but I am not so concerned. I personally think we will get the sales."
For individual surfers, a downside is the inevitable shrinkage of the praised, 41-book free reference website which xref.com launched two years ago. Half of its titles are OUP books whose licences will not be renewed once Oxford Reference Online starts.
