I’m finishing up the The Future of Books Related to the Law? series, and I wanted to close by discussing what e-readers could do to the structure of the textbook publishing market. As before, I much welcome your comments, since I’m now editing my article on the subject (it will be coming out as the Foreword to the Michigan Law Review Books Related to the Law issue).
The legal textbook market differs in important ways from the academic book market.
First, most legal textbooks are probably written at least partly for the money. Textbook writing is generally less valued as intellectual activity than is writing original scholarship — less valued by tenure, promotion, and lateral hiring committees, less valued by colleagues, and less valued by the scholar-authors themselves. Many professors do create their own materials, with no payment, just to more effectively teach their own classes. But creating a book that others can use, with material that you might not use in your own class but that other teachers might demand for their classes — and with a Teacher’s Manual that beginning teachers have generally come to expect — is a good deal more work.
At the same time, the endorsement of an authoritative institution is probably less important for a legal textbook. The authors’ names, and the content of the book, will tend to be more important than the fact that West Publishing agreed to publish the book. The people selecting which textbook to use are themselves law professors, and tend to know who the important people in the field are.
Adopters are also, I expect, less likely to rely on textbook publishers’ selection processes as a real assurance of quality. A list of adopters or, for a new book, a list of other teachers who can vouch for the book’s quality, is probably going to be more informative to would-be adopters than the West Publishing trademark.
The marketing for textbooks is also quite different from the marketing for scholarly books. Because all the buying decisions are done by a small group of people — law professors deciding which books to assign — legal textbook publishers have salespeople who visit the schools, knock on professors’ doors, and offer to talk about the books.
Finally, if many students don’t have e-readers, professors would have to make sure that print copies of the textbooks are also available. But those will often be easily produced by campus printing services, which already produce coursepacks for professors. Such printing will eliminate much of the cost advantage of electronic distribution; but students could get back those cost advantages simply by investing in an e-reader.
My sense is that, once e-readers become common among law students, the textbook market can fairly easily move away from the established publishers and towards something like self-publishing (perhaps with some sort of blurbs from respected colleagues added to the author’s own reputation). Professor-authors can generally find effective ways to promote their own books to their fellow professors, for instance by mentioning them on discussion lists and on blogs, e-mailing academic friends and acquaintances, and the like. They can also realize huge cost savings for students while still maintaining or even increasing their royalty streams. This will be especially so if adopters end up being even slightly sensitive to student costs, so that faced with a choice between a $25 self-published book by a prominent scholar and a $100 West Publishing book by another prominent scholar they will — all else being equal — prefer the former.
Now of course once this begins to happen, textbook publishers will try to compete, likely by reducing their prices. As with the other markets, I don’t expect traditional publishers to entirely vanish. But we will likely see a move towards a much more mixed market, with prices likely considerably lowered by the presence of self-publishing authors who have very low costs (besides, of course, their time, which is already paid for by their universities).
yankee says:
Is there some reason this whole thread has been about “law books?” I haven’t seen anything that couldn’t be applied to non-law books as well.
October 9, 2009, 7:35 pmPatrick says:
Probably because the author is a law professor.
I wish the concept and technology had been around when I was in college and law school, paying fifty dollars (and them was 1986 dollars!) a copy for trade paperbacks.
October 9, 2009, 9:17 pmSoronel Haetir says:
One possible reason may be that many of the books in question, especially case books, contain a great deal of quoted material. I can see some of the discussed factors being far less relevant for books that require original prose from the author.
October 9, 2009, 9:48 pmEli Rabett says:
The primary issue in textbook publishing is that the people who choose the textbook do not pay for it. In the light of that issue, you can forget about textbook prices falling. The publishers will simply provide more goodies to the professors.
BTW all textbooks are written for profit, not just law texts.
October 9, 2009, 11:28 pmlb says:
There is another problem with e-readers in law schools. Many, if not most, of law school exams today are open book – do you think schools will allow e-readers into exam rooms? Also, students depend on taking notes in the book (and highlighting, etc) – how will that affect the potential “market”?
October 9, 2009, 11:50 pmFat Man says:
A good question might be why have books for law school at all, and why are they so expensive. Law school text books are about 97% cases and statutes which are not subject to copyright. Profs could download the cases and statutes and post them to a web site.
October 9, 2009, 11:56 pmJames N. Gibson says:
This is a very interesting discussion. As IB noted, what if the test is open book. Ten years ago I took a State engineering exam in which you were allowed to bring in as many texts as you could carry in with two hands. I was stunned by the number of people who were carrying two fully loaded milk crates of engineering textbooks and references. All this would be changed by the readers in that people could have access to an entire library.
In the same regard, when I took a 2nd year physics course the professor in a fit of Liberalism banned electronic calculators (even electronic calculator watches). He was upset that the students with the most money had the best self-programable calculators and thus had an unfair advantage over the poorer students. To make a long story short he demanded everyone learn a slide-rule (which no one could in the short semester we had with him). In the same regard couldn’t a teacher, in a similar I’ll even the playing field manner, ban the readers and force everyone to use print text (as in his or her preprinted class notes).
October 10, 2009, 12:14 amCato The Elder says:
“In a fit of Liberalism…” LOL. That’s good. Added to my bunch of stock phrases.
October 10, 2009, 1:07 amSoronel Haetir says:
I forget which of the standardized tests it was, the ACT, SAT or one of the SAT IIs, graphics calculators were allowed, but you had to demonstrate that you had cleared the memory. Not that the math was really such that anything beyond the base functions were needed anyway, but still. This would have been in 1995 or 1996.
October 10, 2009, 8:52 amEli Rabett says:
On the calculator thing, we only allow one line calculators, not the fancy graphing ones with memories. You can (and students have) stuff textbooks in there.
October 10, 2009, 10:06 amSoronel Haetir says:
Didn’t HP used to produce a 1-line programmable calculator? I miss HP calculators. TI and Casio feel like junk in comparison. Not that I can use either since going blind.
October 10, 2009, 1:01 pmMike McDougal says:
That’s going to make it rough for those who produce commercial supplements keyed to particular textbooks.
October 10, 2009, 1:31 pmMLS says:
E-books seem as if they may hold some promise. Too bad that I have as yet to see any hardware platform that even comes close to the versatility of a POB (Plain Old Book).
Ever try to fold over the corner of an LCD to mark a page?
Ever try to stick a Post-It on a page so you can find it immediately?
Ever try to read an e-book when the reader is missing its battery?
Ever try to read an e-book while sitting outside in the sun?
Ever try to read an e-book when the internal electronics of a reader fail one day after the warranty has expired?
When someone finally comes up with a hardware platform that is the form/fit/functional equivalent of a POB I will reconsider my position, but I fear that such a platform will be a long time in coming.
October 11, 2009, 12:12 amJoe Miller says:
Eugene,
October 11, 2009, 6:48 pmIn case you had not heard about it – there’s already a web-based casebook publishing venture that uses some of the ideas you discuss. I am a co-owner of it, as well as a co-author of the IP Survey casebook sold there. It’s called Semaphore Press.
LeroyBrown5000 says:
It seems one of the greatest advantages to moving to electronic-based texts for law school is the ability to download updates. While Eli has an excellent point about professor requirements distorting an open market, it’s likely that two things will happen: significant open-source-code applications will be developed that will “break the lock” publishers have on non-copyrighted material and West and Lexis will allow the linking of student accounts to such readers. Even if professor-developed electronic texts fail to fully break students from big-publisher control, it should help when it comes to infamous “new editions” and their accompanying official supplements. My Con Law class just spent almost $170 a pop on Dean Chemerinsky’s 3rd edition only to be told we needed another $20 “update” barely two months after the main text was available for sale. It will also make for a very interesting larger debate on the “used” electronic media rights market.
October 11, 2009, 10:18 pmVinny B. says:
Are you kidding? At many schools, the professors rake in some serious cash by selling notes and course materials. E-files will cut into their profits because they will be shared. That idea won’t get too much play.
October 13, 2009, 10:03 pmADouglas says:
Note, students already have an “e-book reader,” it is called a laptop/notebook. eBooks are just a format, there is absolutely no reason that a reader program would not run on a personal computer. The question remains, what kind of Digital Rights Management/Technical Protection Measures the books would be encumbered with. To be worth anything, they would have to allow the ebook to be annotated, highlighted, and have sections of it printed out. The way that content providers have approached digital distribution however, I do not have high hopes that they will get this right (from a consumer usability standpoint). In fact, since I am unaware of a universal eBook DRM format, eBooks would either have to be restricted to one platform, or release their book to multiple platforms.
October 14, 2009, 3:19 pmVolokh on eBooks & eReaders | Jason Wilson | Publishing says:
[...] the last post of the series, Prof. Volokh summarizes what he sees as the future for textbooks and scholarly [...]
January 5, 2010, 2:25 amamazon kindle says:
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May 24, 2010, 10:51 am