If we are to understand the subject of e-lex more fully, it is worth casting a careful eye on its evolution for a while, and then to render an educated opinion on the evolution of lexicography up to this very day, the age of e-lex. It is probably true, not only of philosophy, that whoever gets a firm grip on history will be able to roll out his or her talents across a whole range of frontiers (cf. Viola 2020, 18). Alas, no opportunity will be given here to pursue that end. For those who want to proceed to a more thorough insight into lexicography and find out what the road from lexicography to e-lex has been like: read a text, received in 2016, accepted in 2018 and published that same year by Lexicography (a journal of the Asian Association for Lexicography), which is an original text authored by Darío Metola Rodríguez.
Such a paper (Rodríguez 2018) may be of the utmost use in profiling, in a nutshell, the evolution from lexicography to e-lex. It should at least provide a reasonable starting point for absolute beginners by virtue of its succinctness and the use of examples that the reader may be able to access. Written by a former PhD candidate at the University of La Rioja in Spain, whose doctoral thesis he defended in 2015, the said paper is not quite exhaustive, yet it may prove helpful. This is so because, despite the fact that Rodríguez's text, just as his doctoral thesis, is focused on specific examples of dictionaries dealing with Old English, such examples are considered in the framework of the evolution over the years from lexicography to e-lex.
Just how feasible would it be to behold the wonders of e-lex with no comparison between it and the more typical marvels of a-lex? Sounds like an impossibility, to be sure, but neither is the purpose of this study to take a trip along the avenues of the wonders of e-lex. Should this be done, though, the above suggestion could be reiterated, perhaps followed along the lines of a text published in 2020 in the International Journal of Lexicography under Oxford University Press, authored by Reinhard Heuberger. In it, Heuberger examines the doors that electronic means are opening up as regards the production and usage of dictionaries, and looks at some instances of a‑ and e-lexicographic creations devoted entirely to the tongue in which the highly esteemed reader is presently in the act of reading.
The wonders of e-lex are to be met in both the words and the underlying premisses found in Heuberger's paper. Paying attention to the wonders of e-lex, construed with reference to the previously referred text (Heuberger 2020), should be enough to enable stakeholders (anyone interested) not only to grasp the basics of e-lex, but also to appreciate why e-lex differs from analog lexicography (or a-lex). The very first page, by way of illustrating this latter aspect, can already tell the reader that access to dictionaries in the realm of e-lex is not just a matter of using the dictionary but rather, more narrowly, of being able to gain or provide access to the dictionaries, partly because of a business model that fosters cost-free services (see below).
The writer from the University of Innscbruck, Austria, observes that the leading publishers of monolingual English learner's dictionaries are already offering free online versions (although in some cases only basic ones, as noted in Ibid, note 1) of their authoritative editions. This may imply that one of the wonders of e-lex is to be riding high in the forefront of the movement for open access, or else it would hardly be true that, even in the arena of commercial publishing houses, the "business model" that has become the standard has been that of "offering these internet dictionaries free of charge" (Ibid, 10). How curious does e‑lex's propensity for open access sound?
Given that even in the world of business, and even in a realm not renowned for its friendliness with regard to open access, such as that of the English language, it ultimately pays off in the end to ensure open access (as can be inferred from Ibid and Rodríguez 2018), something particularly exceptional needs to be noticed and explored in detail regarding the world of e-lex. This very exceptional something ought to be detected and thoroughly researched, not least to realize i) that all such something or value is not susceptible of being expanded into other areas, even if adapted to a greater or lesser extent; ii) that in the final analysis, all of that value is only relevant to the web-market of lexicography, as well as to the general domain of language sciences and technologies and all related areas such as those of language engineering or the computational sciences.