The paper book is a familiar and generally well-loved technology. It also has advantages over e-readers that might endure for many years. The main ones have to do with how much material one can see at once, without flipping a page or clicking a button. Paper books still let people see more text, on two open largish-sized pages, than can be seen on a modern e-reader screen. [Footnote: This stems from three reasons: E-readers’ lower legibility requires them to use a larger font; their screen size tends to be smaller, presumably for cost and portability reasons, than the text size of a typical book (though screen size for the Kindle DX, which is designed specifically for textbooks, is roughly the same as the text size of a typical textbook); and a hardcover or loose-leaf book can be opened to show two pages at once. I don’t speak here of the supposed esthetic benefits of holding a paper book in your hand; I’m not sure that such benefits are on balance likely to be seen as high enough even with books that are read for pleasure, but they seem especially low as to books related to law. Students, professors, and lawyers are likely to make much more functional approaches towards the textbooks, treatises, study aids, and scholarly books that they real.]
Also, people can cheaply have several books or printouts in front of them at once. Few people are likely to buy several e-readers to duplicate that experience, until e-readers get as cheap as CD players have become over time. [Footnote: Of course, one can have many books available on the reader, and can switch among them at the click of a few buttons. But that’s not quite as easy as having several items that you can read side by side. Losing or damaging an e-reader is also much more expensive than losing or damaging a book. This may lead people to be highly reluctant to take e-readers certain places, such as beaches or bathtubs, and to give e-readers to their small children; but that’s a matter more relevant to pleasure reading and children’s books than to legal books.
But e-readers offer material advantages over paper books, and are likely to offer still more within just a few years. This will be enough, I think, to lead most users of law books to eventually shift to e-readers, and especially to influence law students and young lawyers who are already used to reading many things on computers.
First, e-readers are more portable than books. Hundreds of books’ worth of data can fit on a reader that is the size of a hardback, and the weight of a paperback. This is especially useful for law students who have to carry several books for their classes — a typical textbook weighs 4 pounds, and a semester’s worth of books is a back-straining load — and for lawyers who have to carry many books and other documents to court or on a trip. (The Kindle 2 lets you upload your own documents onto it for free.)
But e-readers don’t just help people carry those books they’re already carrying. Rather, e-readers also make books more immediately available. Lawyers could have all their favorite treatises and most important statutory and regulatory sources constantly at hand. Students could be sure to always have their hornbooks or outlines, together with their textbooks.
E-readers can make it easier to find one’s books. All the books, and other materials such as downloaded articles or cases, are right there on the reader, available through its alphabetizable table of contents; you needn’t spend time searching for that misplaced book. Of course, this assumes that you haven’t misplaced the e-reader itself, but it’s easier to keep track of one e-reader than of many items.
E-readers make it easier to buy books, which can be selected in seconds and then downloaded in a few minutes. Of course, impulse buys are uncommon for law books. But this ties in to one more reason that many readers of law books might want to buy e-readers: E-readers are also useful for reading other books, newspapers, and the like, for which impulse buying and instant delivery can be important. As lawyers and law students buy Kindles and the like for pleasure reading, they’re likely to use them for legal reading as well.
E-readers can also make each book more usable. First, they can make source material more available. Case or statute references in a treatise, for instance, could link directly to the text of the case or statute. This text could be distributed as part of the work, for especially important sources. Or the treatise could be linked to a Web database, such as Findlaw, Westlaw, and the like, which could be reached through the e-reader’s built-in cellular modem. Such a link would be slower, but faster than going to the library or even to one’s main computer to track down the source.
E-readers also make books more searchable. This is especially helpful for reference works, but is also useful for textbooks, and to some extent for scholarly works. If you’re looking for a passage you remember, you can find it by just recalling a key word. Traditional indexes provide some such flexibility, but full-text search is quicker and generally more comprehensive.
And e-readers can provide instant translation through built-in dictionaries, whether for English words, legal jargon, or foreign words. This is especially useful for foreign language speakers who are studying or researching American law, for English speakers who are studying or researching foreign-language law, or for law students who need quick lookup of legal phrases. (The Kindle 2, for instance, lets you set any dictionary you buy as the primary dictionary, though it comes with a free New Oxford American Dictionary.)
On top of this, e-readers have the potential to substantially reduce the cost of books. Going electronic will cut down on printing costs, shipping costs, and storage and distribution costs on the publisher side, plus the costs of shelving and operations at the bookstore. This should quickly offset the cost of the hardware. Law students, for instance, generally have to buy $400 or more worth of books each semester; if that bill is reduced by just 20%, the savings will quickly exceed the Kindle 2’s $300 price tag (and there’s every reason to think that e-reader prices will fall, just as prices for other hardware, from computers to CD players, have fallen). There’s more on the cost issue, though, below.
[More to come soon on improvements that manufacturers and publishers need to make — but can probably make without much difficulty — to make this happen.]
Bruce McCullough says:
What about marginalia? My most valued books are filled with my annotations. For most of the books I read (e.g., excluding potboilers), there’s not much point in reading it if I can’t write in it. So it’ll be a while before e-books are a viable substitute for printed books, at least for me.
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October 2, 2009, 10:20 amaltysin says:
Good points.
And it’s not just as against physical books that ebook readers have an edge. Ebook readers are more convenient than laptops. In a hearing, it’s a pain having to make sure you’ve got enough battery life or find an outlet. And no judge wants to wait two minutes for Windows to boot up so you can quote relevant authority.
Instant on, long battery life ebook readers are a big improvement.
Though we may end up meeting in the middle somewhere with some tablet pc’s incorporating ebook readability/longevity features with email/word processing/browsing capability.
Bruce, good point about annotations/margin comments.
With physical law books, I know we get replacements every year– updated civ pro/statutory manuals with commentary. Any notes I make in one year’s edition are lost when I move to the next one.
Imagine you’ve got the ebook on your desktop computer, so you can make notes in the course of your day to day practice. Then it syncs with your portable ebook reader so that your annotations and cross-references are there with you in court. That’s the direction I think we’ll go.
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October 2, 2009, 10:23 amChrisTS says:
I agree with Bruce. In fact, learning studies show a very strong correlation between annotating, underlining, etc. and undersatnding and retention.
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October 2, 2009, 10:29 amdrunkdriver says:
From the litigator’s perspective: I’m very pro-technology and often use electronic evidence presentation methods.
However, for the traditional “trial notebook” the lawyer typically uses to organize himself and keep references handy, I’ve found that putting it on a laptop doesn’t work that well for me. The traditional 3-ring binder method still seems to work the best.
Maybe as Kindle-type technology continues to develop, this will change. I’m always looking to cut down on paper usage and have long thought “there’s gotta be a better way.”
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October 2, 2009, 10:34 amStruthius says:
I have a Kindle DX and love it, for all the reasons Eugene mentions.
Bruce mentions marginalia–Kindles allow for that, but it’s sure not as easy as a yellow marker and jots in the margins. But you can highlight, annotate, bookmark, etc, and easily refer back to your notes later. Sort of clumsy, but I’m sure it will get easier over time.
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October 2, 2009, 10:38 amJames H says:
A couple other points:
1) I’d like to see this sort of functionality put in an iPhone app. I switched from Palm and cell phone and MP3 player to iPhone because I only wanted to carry around one fiddly handheld device. Would rather not have to carry around another one.
2) How will legal publishers handle book subscriptions? Will I receive electronic pocket parts for a year? How will publishers charge for this service? And would I be able to pick up the latest edition of a hornbook for less than list price if I have the original edition?
3) With paper books, I keep the book forever and can refer to it (with updating on my own) for as long as I like. If publishers choose a subscription model, I would lose access to hornbooks if I decide not to keep up my subscription.
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October 2, 2009, 10:39 amWhy Legal Books Are Likely To Go Electronic (Pretty Soon) | Library Stuff says:
[...] Volokh has thoughts on this issue. Posted in Legal research | Trackback | del.icio.us | Top Of [...]
Struthius says:
James,
Amazon has a free Kindle app for the iPhone. I use it also. (You don’t have to own a Kindle to use it; Bezos can sell $9.99 books to millions of iPhone users.) The only drawback, and it’s not a big one, is that Kindle can download books directly, but the iPhone needs to be connected to a PC. A cool feature is that you can sync between the two devices, so if I’m reading a book on the Kindle then switch to the iPhone, I can automatically go to the last page read, and vice versa.
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October 2, 2009, 10:45 amCato The Elder says:
But how do you feel about the piracy that will accompany this revolution, Prof. Volokh? Of course I have no bearing on your finances, but I think the move to e-readers might readily diminish the perk of easy textbook income that many law professors have grown accustomed to. The music industry has had terrific problems with the digital revolution despite the fact they have lots more skin in the game, possess industry groups replete with scads of lawyers, and market a much more valuable product per copyright title than textbook manuscript writers. Also, while even small manipulation of a final musical product renders it practically worthless to its consumer, the standards are not so for law textbooks — assuredly, I would read you in Arial, in Helvetica, in PDF, DOC, or encrypted TXT. But I simply must have my LOTR soundtrack in 256 kbps AAC. Who will protect the law profs’ interests, especially when it will be quite cheap to violate them?
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October 2, 2009, 11:02 amNAK says:
While I agree with the overall premise of this post, I believe that there is one hurdle that still needs to be addressed before e-readers can be used in the legal/academic setting. There needs to be some sort of hyperlinked footnote system. Right now, there is no way for me to seamlessly jump between the text of the book and any footnotes/endnotes included within the text. If I am reading a legal treatise or textbook, I need to be able to see the citations beside the lines I am reading. Once the Kindle and other e-readers resolve this issue, then it will be ready for the academic community.
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October 2, 2009, 11:44 amMike says:
In addition to the issues of marginalia and usability (e.g., I for one work a lot faster with a stack of reference books than with all those books available to me electronically, even more so if I had them only in a Kindle or the like), I am not a fan of a lot of “e-content” as offered today, including e-books, because you often pay the same or more for less, even to the point where the publisher can delete it out from under you. A recent review on arstechnica.com of the new PSPgo video game system makes that point over the downloaded content that you have to now use versus the physical disks, and what you now can’t do (like play it on a friend’s PSP, buy used games, or trade them in), even though they cost the same. Similarly with music bought online, you pay the same and get lossy, compressed MP3s or AAC’s versus uncompressed 44.1KHz/16bit PCM audio on a physical CD, which you have the option of also turning into MP3s.
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October 2, 2009, 11:46 amJeffH says:
I do not see wide scale adoption of e-books in academia until two things happen.
1) It becomes as easy to take notes and make highlights in an e-book as it currently is with a paper book, pen, and highlighter. As others have noted, this is a substantial portion of the value that paper books provide.
2) The true cost of e-books comes down to the level of paper books. Currently the true cost of an e-book is far higher than that of the paper book. E-books and paper books typically sell at the same price, but e-books lack any resale value due to the DRM in place.
While some have stated their concerns about increasing “piracy”, I feel these concerns are misplaced. Digital piracy of books is already both possible and common. Scanned copies of print books, and in some cases the original .pdf files the books were printed from, can already be found on P2P networks. While there probably will be an increase in the number of people who are willing to circumvent copyright to obtain books, that increase is going to happen whether there is a shift to e-books or not.
College students who are willing to copy songs to save $.99 will not think twice about copying a book to save $200.
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October 2, 2009, 12:33 pmConsumed consumer . Org says:
Excellent points. Alas, you seem to assume that ppl always do what’s right / logical. As if behavioural economics had no reason to exist... :)
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October 2, 2009, 12:39 pmNonCognsoco says:
As a current law student, I would definitely buy an e-reader if my textbooks were available for it.
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October 2, 2009, 1:43 pmSam says:
Many kinds of digital texts have ways to add notes already, and many can be retrofitted to have some capability. Kindle has a clip and annotation capabilities; another example, check out PDF Annotater.
This semester, I’m using Microsoft OneNote for all my classes, on a convertible tablet pc. OneNote is kind of a digital notebook, another example is EverNote. The ability to draw on documents makes the tablet more useful than a standard notebook, I import PowerPoint slides into OneNote, then markup during class.
Tablet PCs used to be quite expensive, and most new ones still are, but now there are a few netbook convertible tablets and the HP tx2, which are more expensive than similar notebooks but not outlandishly expensive. I use a Fujitsu P1620 I picked up off of eBay, which is a real Core 2 Duo based ultraportable (2.5 lbs!)
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October 2, 2009, 2:35 pmTatil says:
I don’t know about law textbooks in particular, but in many other fields the return on “textbook income” is so low when calculated per hour spent on researching, writing and proofreading etc, I doubt any authors will lose much sleep. Book writing has usually more to do with prestige and altruism. On the other hand, the publishers are probably a lot more concerned.
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October 2, 2009, 2:54 pmChrisTS says:
I’m still waiting for the flying cars we were promised long ago. Not to mention the three day work week.
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October 2, 2009, 3:47 pmJon Roland says:
It is not just that ebooks are cheaper and more functional, nor is it the high cost of printing hard copies. The problem has been the high overhead of marketing. Witness textbooks that sell for over $80/copy. It isn’t the high cost of color printing that does that. The books can be printed for less than $1/copy, as we can see from the one-off publishers like booksurge.com or lulu.com.
From my experience with textbook review by the Texas State Board of Education, I have seen the amounts of money the publishers spend, with suspicion that a lot of it goes to kickbacks.
In the future there will still be printed books, but one will be able to get them as one-off printouts.
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October 2, 2009, 5:54 pmRandy says:
I have often wondered why some enterprising law student doens’t come up with a substitute for books. Afterall, most of the content of law books is public domain cases. Sure, they are edited. So edit them once, and then they are available. Most textbooks actually explain nothing, except perhaps have some questions at the end of the case.
I would love to see some sort of online or e-text that is a mixture of a course outline and case law. This would eliminate the need to buy both the text and the outline needed to understand what the professor was supposed to teach in the first place.
Marginilia is just that — of marginal worth. Perhaps it’s the process of doing it that makes sense, but if marginalia that a student writes in is actually worth anything, it’s what should be available in an outline.
Throw in a section on how to get an A on an actual law exam, and you have a winning combo. Then, the only real cost is updating this outline with new law (which can’t be onerous), and distribute online. The costs are all upfront in getting it going, and then there are viturally none, so in that sense it’s like any other piece of software.
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October 2, 2009, 6:38 pmGarth Somerville says:
Regarding annotations, this is an area where readers can definitely improve. With e-text, a rich annotation system can be made collaborative and social. Commentpress and Book Glutton are two examples of this. As an experiment, I built a demo application that shows how fine-grained annotations can be represented as threaded conversations, which makes them scalable:
http://www.annospace.com/#doc=welcome-annospace
I would think this would have application to legal documents, patents, debate transcripts, etc.
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October 2, 2009, 7:31 pmJon Roland says:
My problem with these tools is that they are only one-level deep. I want to be able to annotate multi-volume sets of books with books, chapters, sections, subsections, and so forth. A single level of annotation is all right for short writings, but not for longer, more structured ones.
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October 2, 2009, 9:38 pmRich Rostrom says:
You’ve overlooked a key aspect of e-books. They can be instantly corrected or updated after they have been delivered. Or at any time.
Paper books are fixed at the time of production, and remain fixed until a new edition is produced.
The disaggregation of changes is an enormous difference.
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October 2, 2009, 10:13 pmTruePath says:
I agree with the sentiments expressed above about the Kindle not being quite ready to replace most textbooks, at least based on my extrapolations from my kindle2 and the features on the Kindle DX. Fiction works quite well on the kindle but the poor treatment of footnotes, the cumbersomeness of using location numbers (~1 per sentence) instead of page numbers, and the poor page/location management features are all big hurdles.
However, that having been said I think you are substantially overestimating the drawbacks in your post and neglecting some of the benefits or e-book readers. Sure, you may not have a second e-book reader lying around so you can compare two works but a well designed reader with a large screen would simply let you split the screen and view both at once and have a few buttons that remember temporary locations for the user so they can flip back and forth very fast. Moreover, unlike paper books e-readers can let you easily compare different locations in the same volume. Personally I find I have to do that more often than comparing different volumes.
A huge benefit you don’t mention is that ebooks enable anyone to produce books with a little bit of software, and presumably to edit them as well. Did you find an error in the textbook you teach out of every year? Create a patch and distribute it to your students. Want a free copy of books that have left copyright? Someone has already gone to the trouble of creating the ebook for you. Lastly, it lowers the barriers to access giving you access to niche fields and books the publishers simply made the wrong call about.
I mean consider how close a call Harry Potter had getting published. Surely sometimes the author is a bit less persistent or less lucky and similar quality novels are actually rejected. Not to mention you’ll be able to read your harry potter slash in a form that’s easy on the eyes.
As to the concerns raised by other commenters about battery life and the dangers of relying on computers at court. I find if I turn off the wifi mode on my kindle I really get like two weeks or so of reasonably heavy use out of the battery. That’s a pretty hefty safety margin for court. Also, unlike computers, e-readers are a single purpose device and there is no reason for them not to be as reliable as any other appliance. In fact, I suggest that e-readers offer much greater protection from document screwups at court. Since everything is contained in one small unit you are unlikely to forget documents and should you forget it or somehow break it you can just borrow one from a colleague and load your remote backup.
Finally the whole bit about losing the superior aesthetics of books is total garbage. Obviously people just feel very strongly about books since they’ve associated them with so many pleasent experiences. If they grew up with decently styled ebooks they would feel the same way about those devices.
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October 3, 2009, 2:36 amTruePath says:
Ohh two other interesting thoughts about ebooks:
1) It’s possible that clients or ABA guidelines will start insisting on the use of ebook readers for confidential documents whenever possible as they can be encrypted to guard against theft/lose and you have finer access control.
2) They pose a serious challenge to copyright law and the notion of fair use. When ebooks becomes widely used people are going to start doing things like changing the endings to books and fanfic will compete with books on a level playing field instead of occupying a computer only ghetto.
3) What will become of the first sale doctrine once ebooks become popular? Will we start having EULAs for our books? Will the lending of books be technologically or legally restricted in some manner and does this mean the elimination of the library?
I mean if you allow people to lend each other ebooks there is nothing to prevent the creation of a massive book pool that relies on the law of large numbers to guarantee that there is always a copy of the book you want availible to be checked out whenever you want to display content from the book.
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October 3, 2009, 3:03 amyankee says:
Indeed; for example, the ebook companies can “update” the book by deleting the entire contents. Amazon has of course apologized for that incident and promised not to do it again, but the potential remains.
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October 3, 2009, 11:04 amVolokh on eLawtric books: Post No. 2. | Jason Wilson | Electronic Books says:
[...] his second post, Professor Volokh sets forth several “arguments” for eReaders. These arguments, IMHO, are [...]
K. D. Miller says:
Buying the Kindle is the best thing I have ever done for my reading. It was easy to learn my way around it; it operates very easily and I am reading far more than ever before.
I take my Kindle everywhere with me — just throw it in my purse and it’s there for me if I stop somewhere for a cup of coffee while shopping or if I’m waiting for an appointment. I even take it to the movies and read while I’m waiting for the picture to start.
We travel a lot and always used to take three or four hard cover books with us, taking up much space in our suitcases. Now all the books I might want for any length vacation are available on my Kindle.
My husband was so impressed with mine that he bought one two days later and enjoys it as much as I do.
Get one! You won’t be disappointed.
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December 13, 2009, 9:44 pmAmy Enz says:
I figured out there’s three kinds of folks who enjoy their technology toys; those who like to communicate, those who like to play games and those who like to savor a good read. The Kindle is great for the latter group. I can read articles in the NYT, a biography of Martha Summerhayes (Vanished Arizona), the Opinionated Weekly newsmagazine, almost anything electronically available! No matter if I’m waiting for my truck to get fixed at the dealer, or waiting for a road crew, passing the time at lunch breaks or waiting for my boyfriend while he’s picking up something while I wait in the truck for him, I now whip out my Kindle and I’m a happy camper. And for the icing on the cake, I can get online banking, news, market news, radar and a weather report on the road when it’s crucial. Don’t have to tether myself to anything! Total freedom, love it! The Kindle goes with me everywhere.
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December 13, 2009, 9:44 pmVolokh’s great series on ebooks, legal texts, & the future. | Jason Wilson | Publishing says:
[...] 2. Why Legal Books Are Likely To Go Electronic (Pretty Soon) [...]