(This is part of a series; the earlier posts are here.)
So we’ve spoken about why lawyers, law students, and law professors might shift to e-readers, and how this shift may change their reading habits (especially by letting them have their main reference works constantly available). But the shift should also lead to a change in the content of legal books.
Size: The most obvious such effect will be to remove the influence of page limits. My First Amendment casebook is now 1074 pages, including front matter, and my publisher tells me that the next edition can’t get any bigger. And there are good reasons for that, both related to cost and to bulk. That means that if I add some new cases, I have to remove or trim down some old cases — that’s work for me, and inconvenience for teachers who use my textbook but find that a case they taught from the previous edition is missing from the new edition.
Likewise, if I’m interested in adding a new chapter (for instance, about the First Amendment and ballot access restrictions, something I don’t now cover, or about Framing-era views on the First Amendment), I either have to cut something else, or forgo the new material. This limits the useful material I can add, and the choices I can present to the teachers who adopt my book.
If my textbook moves to e-book format, these constraints will fall away. And though long law journal articles or scholarly books are hard to get through, thick (but well-edited) textbooks are good: Textbook authors deliberately design books to have more material than each adopter will need, so that adopters can pick and choose what to include. If my textbook grows to the equivalent of 1500 paper pages, but remains easily portable, no student will have to read all 1500 pages. My adopters would still assign the same number of pages that they usually assign, but they would have more topics to choose from, and perhaps more cases in each topic to choose from.
Removing page limits would also let authors include valuable supplementary material — statutes, regulations, datasets, and the like. A scholarly book could include a great deal of supporting evidence, so that readers who are interested could examine it, and even readers who don’t want to see all the evidence could feel more confident in the book’s accuracy because the evidence would be there. A copyright treatise could include the full text of the Copyright Act and of all Copyright Office regulations.
To be sure, lifting the page limits could lead some textbook authors to underedit the cases. But the current page limits may lead some authors to overedit them. And in any event, experienced textbook authors know that they need to edit cases well, so that students don’t have to read unnecessary material, and so that textbook adopters don’t have to assign too many pages per class session.
Malleability: E-books can also be easily changed, both at the time they are sold and later. One consequence is that textbooks could be custom-produced for particular teachers, with little extra work for the authors.
It shouldn’t be hard to create a textbook assembly program that lets an instructor choose which cases from a textbook should go into the custom e-book that he will assign for his class, and which order they’ll go in. The program might be designed in a visually friendly way that lets instructors drag cases around using the mouse, and it might even automatically fix forward and backward references (with help from metatags embedded in the source file by the textbook author), or warn the user when some case is being deleted but another case that refers to it is being kept. The resulting packet will be easier for students to navigate, especially if the instructor’s syllabus would otherwise have skipped around a lot.
Such a program could also make it easy for the instructor to add supplementary materials, or perhaps even merge materials from multiple textbooks. The sales price can be suitably and automatically split between the textbook publishers according to some prearranged fee schedule. And students will have one “book” that they’ll read beginning to end, rather than a book of which they’ll read half, coupled with some separate supplementary materials.
This malleability also facilitates post-sale changes. E-textbooks, e-treatises, and even scholarly e-books would then be easier to update. New cases and other new developments could be added right away, without having to wait for the next Supplement. To be sure, this will lose publishers the profits on sales of Supplements. Perhaps publishers will then charge for the updating service, to make up for that (though the cost savings of electronic delivery mean they wouldn’t need to charge as much as they do for the printed Supplement). But in any event, the immediate and seamless supplementation should be so valuable to teachers and to students that some publishers are quite likely to start offering it, and when they do, others will have to follow suit.
Likewise, electronic books are easier to correct. When one user of the book reports a typo, a substantive error, a poorly edited case, or the like, the author could promptly fix it. The software could even immediately distribute the correction to all existing buyers, and perhaps notify them of where the correction took place.
Of course, this needs to be done in a way that doesn’t make readers feel that their bookshelf is being tampered with against their will. [Footnote on the Amazon/George Orwell controversy omitted.] Moreover, a professor or a student who has read a passage the day before class might be surprised and unhappy to find that an unannounced change was made the day of class. But this could easily be dealt with by noting the changes in the text, or giving people the option to accept or reject the change.
Interactivity: E-books could also be made interactive, though that would require some changes to e-reader software, and the development of a protocol through which those changes can be taken advantage of by publisher.
The chief value of this should be for legal study tools. Instead of a books full of written multiple choice practice questions, with answers and explanations at the back, students could use an e-book with interactive questions that immediately explain why some answer was right or wrong. The question sequence could even be paced to a student’s performance, for instance so that the e-book would test a student more on matters that he consistently gets wrong and less on matters that he consistently gets right.
There are already such tools on CD-ROM, but having them available on e-readers should make them more readable and portable. And the advent of e-readers will also make it especially convenient for textbook authors to include such self-testing questions within the book.
In principle, interactivity could also be helpful for some scholarly works and treatises, for instance to depict changes over time, or to allow custom searches of large sets of data. Various reference sites, such as the Census and the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s Web-Based Injury Statistics Query and Reporting System, already provide useful databases that way. But I suspect that this sort of feature would likely be most useful for more data-rich projects than the typical legal book.
Mark N. says:
One downside of not forcing authors to reconsider/edit old material when adding new material might be the keeping around of a lot of stale material. If you can add a Chapter 28 without editing Chapters 1-27, they might just be kept totally intact, as the book grows new appendages.
October 6, 2009, 2:42 pmPlastic says:
I would very much like having textbooks that could be tailored by a teacher to a particular class instead of having the syllabus look like this:
Chapter 1
October 6, 2009, 3:00 pmChapter 2
Chapter 7
Chapter 4, Sections 3-5
Chapters 10-12 (quick overview, read pages 575-580, 633-647, and 721-738)
Chapter 9
Chapters 3 and 5 if we have time
RPT says:
The best “casebook” we had at UCLA was James Sumner’s “Contracts” (aka Gilbert’s Outline). I wish others had been so clear and direct.
October 6, 2009, 3:06 pmPatHMV says:
At what point do you have to ask what’s the difference between a case book and merely a list of cases to be reviewed?
Before Westlaw, one needed the casebook just to be able to have easy access to the actual cases being discussed therein. Today, that’s largely unnecessary, because almost all of the cases are readily available on-line.
Another benefit of the casebook, however, is that the editor removes the parts of each case which are not essential to the lesson which the case is being used to illustrate (for example, where a case being used to teach what constitutes an “offer” also has a major issue over personal jurisdiction, you delete the section of the case which discusses personal jurisdiction, to avoid confusing the new student and keep her focused on the issue regarding offers). Do you really need over 1,000 pages just on the First Amendment and related statutes? How much of the bulk of that material could be easily replaced with just a citation list?
Relatedly, isn’t a page limit of 1,000 pages or so a fairly good limit of what any student could possibly cover in any serious way in a given semester?
Regarding the immediacy of changes, I’m curious about your own approach to preparing your annual supplement and new editions of the casebook itself. Obviously, one must maintain notes throughout the year as you discover new material and think of new things you want to include, but do you really want to have to write it as you go? My dad edits several casebooks and treatises, and while he does some work on each of them on a regular basis, the actual writing of the updates and inserts and new material usually gets done in a large batch as the deadline approaches. I think it would take quite a lot to get most casebook editors out of that practice. I certainly could be wrong about that (goodness knows there’s a lot of lawprof bloggers out there, who obviously enjoy writing daily), but that’s my initial impression.
October 6, 2009, 3:08 pmLior says:
The practice of culling material for several sources to make a “course packet” that is photocopied and sold to students is already common in humanities departments. The producers (usually local photocopying shops or university bookstores) generally have agreements with publishers for licensing the material for this use.
October 6, 2009, 3:22 pmMike McDougal says:
That exists — or at least it used to circa 2001 when I took microeconomics in college. The (paperback) textbook was a custom printing of a couple chapters from a macroeconomics textbook along with some intermediate microeconomics chapters and some advanced advanced microeconomics chapters.
October 6, 2009, 5:05 pmChrisTS says:
One can do an online version of collected articles/excerpts through various systems, including Blackboard. Recent works can be included through a library system’s services (Jstor, Lexis, etc.). My library now offers one-week-turnaround digitizing service for items not online, and they do the copyright work ( which typically falls under fair use for smaller classes).
October 6, 2009, 6:52 pmI only have one course in which I still use hardcopy texts, and I am working on that one. As a professor, I much prefer collecting and annotating works myself, selecting translations, and providing my own [or others' credited] secondary materials to having to use someone else’s book. I can provide alternative interpretations as needed and not have to explain to students why I ‘made’ them purchase a book with which I have some substantive disagreements. I can change or add to course materials rapidly (and avoid the same ‘why did we have to buy this’ complaints). I can even add pictures and graphics.
Here is the downside: it is a LOT of work. I enjoy it, but I know that many do not. I suppose another downside is that, if more professors figure out how to do this on their own, the extbook industry (including ‘e-texts’) will collapse.
Andrew M says:
I had a number of classes in my engineering curriculum that used Blackboard, and, while it was handy, quite often there were access problems, and the limitations of being tethered to your desk, on the internet, with all the attendant distractions limited its usefulness. It was great to have, but none of my classes were completely reliant on it, to their betterment, imho.
October 7, 2009, 11:12 amJonathan D. Abolins says:
Malleability is a great feature of e-books. I appreciated Eugene Volokh suggesting some ways to avoid changes against the will or without the knowledge of the users.
The option of giving the users accept/decline changes might run into situations where the publisher has to force the acceptance of changes whether the user wants them or not. I am think on situations where a court or a settlement in a suit requires the publisher to remove all instances of the contested content.
This is where paper books have an advantage. It’s practically impossible to demand that a publisher find all copies of a book in circulation and have the contested material removed. (If you received a notice to find all copies of such-and-such book on your shelves and to destroy pages 12, 24-32, 244, etc., would you do it?)
Since the e-book publishers usually have control of e-book content, which is often treated as being licenced not bought, they could be expected to pull content or even entire editions in some cases.
Somewhat related to this is the potential for knowing who has copies of a particular e-book edition. Maybe not the exact person, but the e-book reader device. So I wonder if a court judgment or a settlement might require the publisher to electronically push out notices to the edition’s readers telling the customers not to use the contested contest lest they’d be sued.
These issues might not be as much of a problem for law textbooks and such as it is for some other genres.
October 7, 2009, 12:55 pmGranite26 says:
One could almost envision a live licensing system where a teacher creates their own textbook on the fly by checking off chapters from a variety of books (possibly by different authors, and certainly from different ‘books’) and clicks ‘order’. (Hardcopies optional)
Or a number of different ‘versions’ of paper books; all containing a CD of the fulltext, but printed versions only of a popular subset of the material. (People like holding things)
For ebooks, it becomes possible to sell licenses rather than copies (especially for cases where updates are frequent). In this case, a series of classes could all use the same textbook (calculus comes to mind) without a huge upfront cost.
Updates: I would think that the correct solution for updates would be to tag major releases (2009 edition) and have all changes since that major release show up in red in the text, possibly with a hypertext popup of the original text. The user would own a specific release and be eligible for all updates under that edition. When a new major edition was released, he would stop getting updates, although the license agreement may allow him to download the new edition (free or for a nominal fee)
Such a system would allow previews and advertisements as well.
October 7, 2009, 3:41 pmLarryA says:
I think I’d rather have a link to the original. Otherwise we’re trusting that the edited material accurately reflects the original.
Hopefully with a reminder that laws tend to change.
Threadjack on books – From Galleycat: “Today the Federal Trade Commission revised their “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials” urging bloggers who review products, from a book to a video game system, to disclose if they received the product for free when giving an endorsement. According to the Washington Post, breaking these new guidelines could generate up to $11,000 in fines.”
I love the “urging” + “guidelines” –> “$11,000 in fines” part.
October 7, 2009, 6:48 pmVolokh’s great series on ebooks, legal texts, & the future. | Jason Wilson | Publishing says:
[...] 6. How E-Readers Can Change the Content of Legal Books [...]
January 2, 2010, 2:23 amVolokh on eBooks & eReaders | Jason Wilson | Publishing says:
[...] malleability, and interactivity. These are the three buzz words for Post No. 6 and they are meant to describe how eReaders will change the content of legal textbooks. From the [...]
January 5, 2010, 2:25 am