Tag Archives | The Future of Books Related to the Law?

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

(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 […]

(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 […]

(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 […]

(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 […]

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 […]

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 […]