The future of etymological dictionaries

Now that printed books are being replaced by online materials, it is especially important to agree on the format of the etymological dictionary of the future. It seems expedient to discontinue the publication of dictionaries that contain minimal or no new information, for the public already has more than enough of them. The profession needs exhaustive (ideally annotated) bibliographies of everything ever published on the origin of every word in the language under study. Of great use can be thematic etymological dictionaries, such as dictionaries of presumably native words in a given language, of borrowings, of slang, of regional words, etc. Only the languages that have never been the object of sustained etymological research require general dictionaries of the type once produced by Skeat, Kluge, and their peers.