The Volokh Conspiracy

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).

I argued yesterday that the advent of e-readers would reduce traditional publishers’ marginal advantage in publishing scholarly books. This makes it possible for others to compete effectively with book publishers. And the logical candidates for this role would be law journals.

Branding: Law journals have the sort of branding power that publishers do. If the Journal of Law & Economics decided to select books, readers could be assured of much the same things that readers of Harvard University Press books can be assured of: Some serious scholars in the field have read the book, and found it worth publishing.

If the Michigan Law Review decided to do the same, readers would have less valuable information, because the book will have been screened mostly by students. But they would still know that the book was selected through a competitive screening process. Between that and other factors, such as the author’s name, the cover blurbs, and the book reviews (now more accessible than ever, because of the Internet), readers will have a pretty good sense whether the book is worth reading.

Prominent student-edited journals could also institute some level of peer review for books as well, if they wish. The Harvard Law Review and the Stanford Law Review already provide some faculty review of their articles, though not as much as university presses tend to provide as to books.

Academic authors derive value from the publisher’s imprimatur, even independently of its ability to sell books: Placing a book with a publisher is important for promotions, and for professional respect. But we already know that the top law journals, both faculty-edited and student-edited, are also highly valued by authors, because their imprimaturs (whatever their faults) are also respected by the authors’ colleagues. Most law professors would be delighted to be published in the Michigan Law Review, and even more so in the law review at the school sometimes referred to as “the Michigan of Massachusetts.” They would likely be similarly happy to have their book “published,” or more precisely branded, by a hypothetical Michigan Law Review Books project.

The branding by a law journal might at first be less effective with international and interdisciplinary audiences, who aren’t as familiar with American law journals. But the important thing, I think, is that they’ll see that the book bears the brand of some impartial organization, which either has a name that sounds normally prestigious to people in all countries and disciplines find (e.g., the Journal of Law & Economics) or is visibly affiliated with a prominent university (e.g., the Michigan Law Review).

And if the book jacket includes blurbs by prominent academics praising the book and the author, that should further ease readers’ concern. After all, people who look for works from other countries or disciplines generally don’t put that much stock in the precise name of the publisher. They tend to be more interested in the book’s title, the author’s name, and the names of endorsers, and simply expect that the book is published by some reputable-seeming organization that has performed some sort of quality screening.

Continue reading ‘Could the Advent of E-Readers Lead Law Journals to Move Into E-Book Publishing?’ »

In earlier posts on this chain, I started by discussing the first phase of the migration to e-books: whether people will start reading the same content electronically that they’ve long read on paper. I then began considering the “second migration,” in which people take advantage of features of the new technology — for instance, the malleability of e-books, and the relaxation of size constraints — that don’t just emulate the old technology but go beyond it.

But there’s another aspect of the second migration: It opens the door to publishing structures that don’t now exist, making possible both further cost reductions and the distribution of books that can’t be distributed cost-effectively today. Let me speculate briefly and tentatively about that here, limiting myself to the two fields I know best — scholarly books and textbooks — and omitting treatises, other legal practitioner references, and student study aids.

To start with, consider scholarly books about law (i.e., books of original scholarship, rather than textbooks). If you’re a professor who wants to publish an academic legal book, you face a problem. Your primary goal is to get more readers. Secondarily, you’d like to get some money, though you might well be willing to trade off that money for readers. After all, unlike most authors who don’t have academic appointments, you’re already being paid for your time.

Expense limits readership: The trouble is that the book will often be priced at a level that will alienate many potential readers. Let me give as an example a book about which the author guest-blogged on my Weblog: Richard Painter’s Getting the Government America Deserves: How Ethics Reform Can Make a Difference, published by Oxford University Press. The book has a list price of $65, and Amazon sells it for $59.14, though one affiliated store sells it for $52.15+$3.99 shipping. Surely this price will dramatically reduce the number of readers that Prof. Painter will get, compared to what he’d get if the book were priced at, say, $10, or were distributed for free.

Of course, if the book were distributed for free, the author wouldn’t make any money from it. For most law professors, the revenues from an academic book are a small fraction of our salaries: If Prof. Painter makes a 10-20% royalty, that will amount to $6 to $12 per book; and if the book sells 2000 copies (not bad for an academic book, even one that is accessible to a larger audience), the revenues will be nontrivial but not great, either. If his book sells about 300 copies (the number that Prof. Painter reports to me have been sold so far, since February 2009), the revenues will be still smaller.

We routinely spend a lot of time writing articles, which don’t directly make us any money. It seems likely that even if we couldn’t make money from writing books, but could get readers and citations — and books do seem to be more cited than even the most heavily cited articles by the same authors — we’d keep writing.

But if we could cut out the middleman, at least in large part, we might be able to get both more readers and more money. Say, for instance, that authors could find a way of pocketing 80% of the sale price rather than 10%. Then if the book were sold directly by the author for $6 rather than $60, and sold only twice as many copies as a result (not unlikely, given the vastly lower cost), the author would make more money as well as having more readers.

Continue reading ‘E-Readers, and Going Beyond the Current Publication System for Scholarly Law Books’ »

(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.

Continue reading ‘How E-Readers Can Change the Content of Legal Books’ »

(This is part of a series; the earlier posts are here.)

So, as I discussed earlier, e-textbooks have to compete with substantially discounted used textbooks. But scholarly books that are aimed largely at law professors and law students also have to compete with something even cheaper: library borrowing.

Law professors can generally get all the books they want for free, with minimal hassle and modest delay, just by asking their librarians. Law students can often do much the same, though with a bit more work. As a result, for instance, I never buy law-related e-books for my Kindle, though I do download free public domain items (such as Blackstone’s Commentaries), as well as draft articles and the like. Instead, I just borrow the paper books from the library.

Now of course borrowing these books isn’t really free for my employer. The library has to spend money on buying the books, as well as on maintenance, shelving and reshelving, and processing faculty delivery requests. Space that’s used for book stacks is also space that can’t be used for faculty and staff offices, classrooms, and the like. So libraries, their users, and publishers can all profit from making it possible to lend e-books on much the same terms as libraries can now lend books.

And fortunately, there’s ample precedent for this in the site licenses that many libraries already get for various online collections: HeinOnline’s collections of law journal articles, public domain legal classics, government documents, and some more recent treatises; Chadwyck’s Early English Books Online, Gale’s Eighteenth Century Collections Online, Making of Modern Law, and other databases; the Oxford English Dictionary; and the like. University libraries routinely have such subscriptions for all their users, but some public libraries do as well. Libraries and publishers would likewise be able to negotiate for library licenses to lend all new e-books coming from the publisher.

Libraries pay flat rates for each database, and the rates are often quite substantial. This will likely be the same as to, say, a license to lend all new Harvard University Press books. But the costs of buying books can be high, too, especially when coupled with the other costs I mentioned above. Eliminating those other costs means that there will generally be some price point at which authorizing the library-wide license will both increase profits for publishers and decrease costs for libraries.

Determining that price point might not be easy. Different libraries have different costs. Publishers may be reluctant to negotiate in detail with each library. And there’s always difficulty with any change to the way people have long done business. But on balance, and especially given the precedent of the other online databases, libraries and publishers should be able to create an e-book lending model that would replace the old First-Sale-Doctrine-driven paper book lending model.

(This is part of a series; the earlier posts are here.)

Electronic distribution has long been touted as making content cheaper for consumers. This has largely been true: Newspaper articles, including articles from out-of-town or foreign newspapers, are now largely available for free. So are many magazine articles. Many old books are available for free on Google Books and Project Gutenberg; the latter books can be easily downloaded onto the Kindle 2. And many Kindle versions of legal books already tend to sell for about 20% below their list price (though some remaindered copies of slightly older paper books actually sell for a deep enough discount that they cost less than the Kindle versions).

But that discount likely won’t be enough by itself for a broad conversion to ebooks, for two reasons: the used book market, and libraries.

Used book sales, and library borrowing, are both enabled by the so-called “First Sale Doctrine” of U.S. copyright law: Once a book is sold, buyers are free to resell it or lend it, and don’t need the author’s permission for that.

And people routinely take advantage of this. Law students often buy used textbooks, and then sell them back to the bookstore when they’re done. Legal academics can borrow pretty much any book they want from their university libraries. Likewise, lawyers routinely borrow books from the firm library; even sole practitioners may pool their book collections with other lawyers in the same suite of offices. We’ve gotten used to borrowing books for free, once someone at our institution — such as a university or a law firm — has bought a copy.

Yet the same transactions would likely be infringing when done for e-books (and are often technically stymied by copy protection). The First Sale Doctrine only applies to “distribution” of books, which is to say the transfer of tangible items. It does not apply to copying of materials. And “reselling” or “lending” an e-book that’s stored on an e-reader’s disk drive necessarily involves copying.

Even if you copy the book to someone else’s e-reader and then delete it from the original, thus trying to mirror a traditional resale or lending arrangement, you’ll still have performed a copy, and thus infringed the copyright in the work. [Foonote about why the fair use defense is unlikely to allow such copying omitted. -EV] So you can only buy e-books “new”; you can’t lend or borrow them, or buy or sell them used.

This is both a barrier to the wide acceptance of e-book textbooks, and an opportunity for publisher. First, the barrier: One can often find used books on Amazon at a much steeper discount than Kindle books tend to provide. Likewise, many college bookstores offer used textbooks at about 75% of the price of new textbooks, and then buy them back at 50% or so of the sale price, if the store expects the same edition to be used again the next semester.

Let’s consider, then, the economic lifecycle of a textbook. Assume an edition comes out in 2010, the textbook is used in one class per year, and a subsequent edition comes out in 2014 (something that the book¬store sees coming, so that it doesn’t buy the book back after 2013). Assume a national average sales tax (6%), which is charged when one buys the book, new or used, but which isn’t charged when one sells it back to the distributor. Here’s how the transactions might look:

Of course, this pattern won’t be perfectly followed: Many students keep their textbooks for future reference. Some students delay selling back their textbooks, and when they’re ready to sell them back might find that they no longer can. Some students prefer to buy clean books, without someone else’s possibly misguided highlighting and notes distracting them from the text. And some bookstores might refuse to buy back books with too much writing in them. Nonetheless, this table suggests that, for many students, a 20% discount from list price might not be enough to get them to buy an e-book version of the textbook.

Now the opportunity: Textbook publishers are already unhappy with the used paper textbook market. One reason they urge authors to come out with new editions is to dry up the used book market, at least for a while.

Textbook publishers, then, have a substantial incentive to charge much less for e-books, precisely because e-books can’t be resold (and because they’re cheaper to produce and distribute). In the example above, for instance, a publisher could charge 35% of the paper list price for an e-book (amounting to roughly 37% with tax included) and still make more money as well as saving students money. [Footnote: The author would also make more in royalties, assuming the rate remains what it has been, since both the author and the publisher now get nothing from used textbook sales.] The savings will come out of the money that the bookstore would otherwise pocket; the book¬store’s costs and profits would no longer have to be paid for.

The students would also get clean copies of the books rather than having to deal with others’ highlighting and marginal notes; and they would get to keep the books for future reference. All these would be further incentives — in addition to portability and, with the revised pricing plan, cost — for them to embrace e-books. And this would happen naturally, if textbooks coexist in the e-book and paper editions: The competition from the used book market would pressure publishers into reducing the e-book costs.

Of course, if publishers can persuade instructors to adopt e-book-only textbooks, then the competition will be absent. Publishers could continue charging high prices for the e-books, because the used paper books won’t be an alternative. And of course the selection decision is made by law professors, while the cost has to be paid for by law students. Still, I assume that professors will be at least mildly interested in saving their students money, and will react to the student annoyance that would likely be created if the professor’s decision makes students pay more for e-textbooks than students have historically had to pay for used paper textbooks.

More on libraries to come.

(This is part of a series; the earlier posts are here.)

To make e-readers most effective, manufacturers and publishers have to make some improvements to their technology and to their business models.

Let me begin by focusing on readability. E-readers are still not quite as legible as paper. The Kindle 2 is a vast improvement over earlier readers, such as the Rocket eBook from about 10 years ago. Still, its dark-grey-on-light-grey contrast is not quite clear as the contrast on paper. Books on the Kindle 2 are readable, but at least slightly less so than paper.

Current e-readers also tend to reduce the size of illustrations, because of the smaller page size. [Footnote: The Kindle DX, with its fairly large screen, doesn’t seem to have this problem.] You can zoom in on part of an illustration, but that lets you see that part more clearly only at the expense of temporarily making other parts invisible. Either the screen has to get clearer, or the electronic versions of books have to break up the illustrations in ways that maintain the illustrations’ readability.

Second, annotating and highlighting is still considerably harder on e-readers than on ordinary books. On the Kindle 2, for instance, you have to hit a button several times to move the cursor to the words one wants to highlight. To write notes in the margin, you have to type your annotations on a small and fairly clunky keyboard. [Footnote: Cf. Jeffrey R. Young, How a Student-Friendly Kindle Could Change the Textbook Market, Chronicle of Higher Educ., May 6, 2009 (reporting that the difficulty with taking notes on a Sony e-book reader persuaded a university to abandon its experiment with switching to e-reader textbooks).]

Fortunately, it seems likely that a solution will not be long coming: a stylus-based interface, with which people can just touch what they want to highlight, and can handwrite whatever brief notes they want to jot down. Such interfaces are already available on other computers, so it seems likely that they will make their way to e-readers soon.

Third, current e-readers, and the ebooks that are sold for them, generally don’t include the same page numbers as the paper books. This may lead students to be reluctant to switch to e-reader textbooks while their classmates and teachers are still using paper books: When the teacher asks people to turn to p. 123, the e-reader users won’t know where to go.

Fortunately, this too should be easy to deal with. The Kindle software will just need to be able to display the current original page number on each screen, and to let people enter the page number they want. And publishers will have to insert the proper codes in the files that would indicate to the Kindle where each new paper page starts.

Fourth, e-reader search features are primitive — all you can do is search for a particular string. If e-readers are to become useful for large treatises, it would be helpful to allow a LEXIS-/WESTLAW- like set of search operators: AND, OR, NOT, NEAR, and the like. Again, though, the technology for this is readily available.

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.]

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.