That’s the title of a forthcoming Foreword that I was invited to write for the next Michigan Law Review Books Related to the Law issue. The issue itself mostly consists of book reviews, but the Forewords are generally on broader subjects related to legal books or legal scholarship. I thought I’d serialize the article here (with the law review’s permission, of course), largely to get our readers’ feedback. The article is still early in the editing phase, so I have plenty of time to make corrections and improvements. For now, here’s the Introduction.
People have been reading books for over 500 years, in more or less the same format. Book technology has changed in some measure since then. Fonts have become more readable. Books have become more affordable. The indexing of reference works has generally improved. Still, the general form of the book has remained much the same.
But the arrival of e-readers, such as the Kindle 2 and the Sony eBook, offers the possibility of a major change. [Footnote: I’m not wild about the label “e-reader,” since it makes it awkward to talk about readers (people) in the same sentence as “e-readers” (reading devices). But that seems to have become the generic term, with “e-books” being used to mean the electronic text that’s downloaded to an e-reader.] First, people may shift to reading existing books on those readers, and the shift may lead them to change the way they use books, for instance by letting readers have many reference works at their fingertips. Second, the shift may change the content of books. And, third, the shift may change who publishes books, and in some measure which books are published.
In this Foreword, I will try to briefly sketch how these changes might play out as to books related to the law: textbooks, scholarly books, legal books aimed at laypeople, treatises, other practitioner reference books, and law student study tools. I will also talk about what changes to the technology, and to the structure of the legal book market, are likely to be needed to capture the technology’s possible benefits.
The effects of the change in medium will likely be varied. The shift from horses to cars, for instance, allowed long-distance commuting and at the same time reduced the amount of manure on the streets, [“In 1900 New York City’s approximately 120,000 horses produced over 2,500,000 pounds of ‘solid waste’ a day, as well as about 60,000 gallons of urine.”] yet the two are hard to link through a grand theory. But many of the effects will point in the direction in which electronic distribution tends to change the media generally: Electronic distribution will reduce cost, increase choice, and increase convenience. And in the process it will not only facilitate access to existing material, but will also promote the production of more material.
This is naturally a speculative endeavor — we’re only at the beginning of the wide acceptance of e-readers, though we’re about 15 years into the broader cyberspace media revolution. And I’ll make it still more speculative by considering not just the current e-reader technology, but also foreseeable developments in that technology. [Footnote: I’ll therefore set aside some criticisms of e-readers, such as the Kindle DX, that are focused on particular unfortunate design choices in the early-generation models, so long as it seems likely that those problems could easily be avoided in future versions of the product.] But I hope the speculation will still be helpful, both to curious observers and to those who are thinking of participating as authors in the evolution of the legal book.
troll_dc2 says:
Now we know why you were so interested in the amount of horse byproducts that New York City used to enjoy.
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October 2, 2009, 10:12 amWhy Legal Books Are Likely To Go Electronic (Pretty Soon) | Library Stuff says:
[...] See also Posted in Legal research | Trackback | del.icio.us | Top Of Page [...]
Luke says:
My IP Survey prof is currently co-authoring a text and giving chapters in PDF to the class as it’s written. It’s free for us and he gets live guinea pigs to test it on. Win-win I should think. I was initially thrilled, yet I’ve found myself printing out each chapter and marking it up just like I do every other book I’ve had. Perhaps old habits die hard or I’m trapped in the medium I’ve grown up with. All I can say is that I have no user-interface issues with the printed page (aside from lugging a giant binder to class) but plenty with the PDF. I believe I connect with the printed copy in ways I don’t with a screen.
If the last mile of a truly comparable e-book reading experience is the user interface, I think solving that has more to do with understanding how we read than how to deliver documents. What do we really want to do with the e-book? Highlight, underline, annotate in the margins? How would we measure the utility of flipping through pages? What about the tactile context of always knowing where you are by feel? Are there measurable cognitive differences between the two media? A quick google search suggests that perhaps the answer is yes — “Results show that the e-book presence hinders recall of assimilated information whilst the presence of the paper support tends to facilitate it.” (http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhcs.2004.10.002)
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October 4, 2009, 11:30 pmVolokh’s great series on ebooks, legal texts, & the future. | Jason Wilson | Electronic Books says:
[...] 1. “The Future of Books Related to the Law?” [...]
Volokh on eLawtric Books: Post No. 1. | Jason Wilson | Electronic Books says:
[...] in anticipation of an introduction he’s writing for the Michigan Law Review. In his first post on the subject, he had this to say: Electronic distribution will reduce cost, increase choice, and [...]
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December 2, 2009, 8:15 pmBoespflug@gmail.com says:
I highly recommend the Amazon Kindle as the top choice for ebook readers.
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February 7, 2010, 8:28 pm