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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Garth Somerville: 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

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.

http://www.annospace.com/#doc=welcome-annospace

I would think this would have application to legal documents, patents, debate transcripts, etc.

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.

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.

Cato The Elder: I think the move to e-readers might readily diminish the perk of easy textbook income that many law professors have grown accustomed to.

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.

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!)

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.

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.

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.”

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.