Books Have a Presence.

The other night, Mark Bennett, a well-known Houston criminal defense attorney, and I had a very brief exchange on Twitter about a tweet that he’d just received the Georgetown Law Journal’s Annual Review of Criminal Procedure (which you can order here). Here’s the exchange:

MarkWBennett: My Georgetown Law Journal Annual Review of Criminal Procedure arrived today. It’s like law geek Christmas.

jasnwilsn @MarkWBennett: I had no idea. Would you be this excited if it showed up on your Kindle?

MarkWBennett @jasnwilsn: Hmmm. Probably not. Aesthetic elements would be missing

jasnwilsn @MarkWBennett: Right. The weight, the feel, the smell. Visceral. I love law reviews. Missing from eBooks.

If you love physical books, you’ll understand the sentiment because people like us say and write things like this (from a nice little piece on if:book about “The Presence of Print” and the evolution of the Espresso Book Machine):

Looking at my own bookshelves at the moment, my eye is pleased to see three elegantly designed paperbacks of Murakami’s works leaning against one another, while lamenting that the fourth was produced by a publisher with a lesser eye for design and display. My Penguin Classics form a band of black corwned with single red striation, and my cookbooks’ spines flash an array of color that, frankly, makes me hungry.

And if you own old law books that have a history, there is an emotion that travels with it that you don’t get from electronic products. And never will. [I still own all my law school hornbooks. Is that wrong?]

There are a few of us here (and apparently it is a small group) who are true bibliophiles.  We love books. We love the feel of them, the weight of them in our hands, their shape, their smell.  Yes, the smell.  Whether it’s the queer musty smell of time-yellowed volumes or the ephemeral scent of wood pulp and ink pressed between the cover of a hot-off-the-presses case book. It doesn’t matter. Each sniff helps us recall some part of our lives with honest fondness and we’re reminded of all the books we’ve ever bought, read, and loved before we knew anything about anything.

We’re surrounded by books and use them daily. By now, it’s safe to say we’re accustomed to their smell. But the law book does so much more than conjure up memories.  Hold it in your hand, and you’ll come to know its length, how long from beginning to end. Look at the table of contents and you’ll get an idea of its structure. Thumb through the chapters in turn and you’ll gain context for the information. Study the index and you’ll realize how much you can find on your own without having to think too much.

But many law books nowadays are not something lawyers touch. They are simply “data” from sources that we pull from somewhere on the information superhighway. These new books have no cover, no weight, no size, no smell. Their pages are simply a screen, a window to information. As you scroll through these books, there is no sense of progress. Are you close to the end? Is what you’re looking for buried within an endless supply of hyperlinks? Context is lost and your thought process, which was once linear, is now random.  You have access to everything and anything all at once.  And surprisingly, you’re comfortable here because you’ve accepted this new research paradigm.

For over a decade we’ve fought the shift because we eschew randomness; it’s too much of a luxury.  We believe (in our bibliophilic-centric view point) that lawyers need books. Real ones. Books that through their weight and size and smell evoke images of hard-at-work authors and editors buried beneath stacks of reporters and papers discovering the law, writing about it for you.  O’Connor’s is the product.  The books are heavy (but not too much), they’re self-contained, they’re written clearly (so you’ll feel smart), and organized linearly, much like you would practice law.  Oh, and the ink and paper we use makes them smell very sweet.

I wrote this an eternity ago (as if “information superhighway” didn’t give it away), trying to capture how I felt about the products I wrote and the clash with the electronic medium. Don’t get me wrong, I’m comfortable with where we are headed and the steps we have taken as a publishing company to eventually provide our customers with useful digital content.  Truly, the ability to search and manipulate data is sublime and alluring, and I’m seduced by it as any other researcher would be. But, like Mark Bennett, I still look forward to that three-dimensional paperweight we call a book. I will miss it’s weight, smell, and length.

[Image  Chocolate Geek.]