With PLI’s recent announcement to put its titles on the Kindle, a number of posts have popped up proclaiming the Kindle to be the obvious choice for legal electronic books. I’m here to tell you, forget about it.
Yesterday, the WSJ had an article on how well eReaders were being received by college students. The issues identified are the same ones I wrote about in an earlier post:
- eReaders lack highlighting, note-taking, and sharing capabilities.
- eReaders don’t allow for interactive features like videos and quizzes.
- Students reported they couldn’t flip through random pages.
The president of Sony’s digital reading business even stated their eReader “is not a multipurpose device, it is designed for focused reading.” Following this quote, Knutson and Fowlers (authors of the WSJ article) concluded that focused reading is “something that many educators are looking for in a world where students’ lives are filled with digital distractions.”
From what I can tell, “many” educators, particularly in law school, have been talking more about immersive learning and imaginative intelligence, and the limitations of physical books. If anything, we are headed away from focused reading. A couple of weeks ago, if:book asked its readers what they thought the implications of the following quote were on ebooks:
“A book is a machine for focusing attention; the Internet is machine for diffusing it.”
Whether many educators want students’ attention focused is debatable. What isn’t is the fact that students want more diffusion, not less. They do not want to be bounded by the material they hold in their hand. They want the ability to pull in other media for context when they are learning doctrine, and they want the ability to annotate and share (online collaboration is merely an extension of study groups). The only way this is going to happen now is through the Tubes. And this is why the Kindle doesn’t make sense.
The Kindle, or any other eReader, is not designed for how we take in information and learn today. And by extension, it isn’t designed well for law books. Let’s put aside the problem of pricing for a minute (the WSJ article talks about how the price of electronic textbooks is only a few dollars under the print versions), and focus on your first experiences with an electronic legal book. Odds are, it was a multivolume resource, like Wright & Miller for example. Searching it online was great because you didn’t have to leaf through the index, hunt down missing volumes from the stacks, skim several pages of material to find the keywords you were looking for, double check the information against a pocket part, and on. You were probably able to find your information quickly, click on hyperlinks and read cited statutes, rules, and decisions, maybe even other articles, to give you a greater understanding of the material. It opened up the book in a way that physical research didn’t. And, for better or worse, it changed the way you progressed through a publication (i.e., nonlinearly). You’ve since adapted, and are now comfortable with the change.
But now you want to go backwards, to the bounded book. Why? So you can say, “I have my entire library on my Kindle and I can carry it in my briefcase.” Great. How fast is that search by the way? How quickly can you jump from one section to another? Does it have cases and rules on it? Can you take notes on that? Wow, did you just crack your screen?
Seriously. eReaders are a pain in the ass when it comes to legal books. Sure, the PLI titles allow you to link back and forth from footnote to text, and perhaps for them putting multivolume practice series books on the Kindle was an obvious and easy business decision, particularly if they didn’t have their product available electronically already. But it isn’t a sign that law books belong on such devices.
No, law books belong in the Cloud to be accessed by your device of choice, whether it’s a handheld mobile device, a tablet computer, netbook, laptop, desktop, whatever. You should be able to access it no matter where you are, no matter the device, and you should get really basic features, like linked content and the ability to navigate easily, highlight, copy and paste, take notes, and share and collaborate with a community. It isn’t much, but it’s a lot more than what you’ll get with an eReader. And it won’t cost you an extra $300.
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Jason,
Since you asked a related question for the Q&A portion of our Kennedy-Mighell Report podcast (”do you see the big legal publishing houses coming out from behind the walled garden?”) and since in my answer I advocated using e-readers like the Kindle as a way for publishers to do this, I feel compelled to respond to your post.
I do not have the Kindle DX, which I would recommend over the Kindle 2 for reading texts such as you describe. However, on my Kindle, I can:
1. Highlight text;
2. Annotate text and make notes;
3. Save all of those highlights and notes to the web
I know all of this can also be accomplished on the Kindle DX. Admittedly, sharing has not been enabled for notes and highlights — hopefully this will change soon, but it’s also pretty easy to go to my online notes and highlights and copy them over to my Evernote shared notebook for others to use (I know, that’s not the point). It’s also true that it’s difficult to jump from place to place in an e-reader without bookmarks in place. But I have to say that the search feature is pretty damn fast, and just right for what I need. And handheld mobile devices, tablets, netbooks, and laptops are certainly not immune to a cracked screen.
In an earlier podcast I advocated the use of putting rules of evidence or civil procedure on a Kindle or other e-reader — when I used to go to the courthouse, I would often have to lug a couple of different rule books, depending on the type of case and the information I might need. With an e-reader, I could have relevant sections of those rules already bookmarked, and could refer to them pretty quickly if I needed to. So to me I think the best question is: *what* books are right for an e-reader? Not all of them may be, but some of them are, IMHO.
I agree on a couple of points you made: 1) that the current iterations of many e-readers make them less-than-desireable tools for some of the things you discuss; 2) that e-readers are probably not ideal for doing legal research (but I do think they have value for carrying reference books, see above); 3) I also am a big fan of the cloud, and agree that for many of the uses you describe a cloud-based law book would be more desireable.
But there are two issues I see with your proposal:
– Right now cloud-based law books aren’t available in the way you describe them — they’re all within the walled garden, and you have to pay an often hefty subscription fee to access them.
– The biggest issue, to me anyway — wireless connectivity. You’re from Texas like me, so imagine you’re in trial in Newton County, Texas (it could happen), where according to Verizon there’s no coverage. Or instead you’re in a county where coverage is good, but the courtroom you’re in is deep inside the building, rendering your wireless card useless — and the court doesn’t have internet access for the lawyers. Your cloud-based library would cease to exist, if you couldn’t get to an Internet connection. Hopefully this potential problem will not last for much longer, but it certainly won’t be anytime soon here in parts of Texas.
It’s in those times that having a book already downloaded to my device would be of great comfort. True, the e-reader is not the be-all and end-all of solutions for lawyers, and its use needs to be carefully considered in each case — but at least it’s a bit further along than any other alternative.
Tom,
Thanks for the comments. I have the Kindle 1, 2, and DX and the first iteration of the Sony eReader (PRS-5xx). I am utterly fascinated with these devices and of them all, the Kindle 1 is still my favorite for reading books (not researching, but reading).
You are correct to point out that you can highlight, annotate, save to the web, and share through other online services, the content on your Kindle. You can do this on the DX as well. I concede the point that the Kindle maybe an ideal solution for static texts, like statutes, codes, and rules. I could probably put our entire line of O’Connor’s Annotated Codes on the Kindle and be happy with the result. And we may do that sooner than our customers think. No promises there, but it is certainly something we’ve thought about.
What I was trying to convey in the post was the fact that the Cloud represents so much more potential. You’re right that current versions are unsatisfactory, like West’s Interactive Casebook Series and Aspen’s StudyDesk solution (which is confusing as all hell). But for me, the future is on the Web because it allows me to distribute content to my customers without making them buy a piece of hardware to access it. Particularly one that may be out of date in a year or less. It also allows for greater control over design and user experience, which cannot be understated. And there are a some really cool webapps available right now that will have an impact in this area. I do believe we’ll see several viable services within the year.
One last point. I do sympathize with those who have to practice or travel in areas where data connectivity is less than adequate. I’m not sure how we would solve the problem for our customers just yet, but I can assure you that it will be discussed. I don’t like the idea of anyone being with out their O’Connor’s, whether in print or electronic.
When closely reading material, I print and markup like crazy. There’s something about using a marker to mark up a case that goes in hand with a close read (for me personally).
Same goes for treatises. I have some treatises in print and online and I always always find myself turning to the print edition, unless I already know I’m looking for a particular section.
It could be just a matter of training obviously, but sometimes you pick up habits that are hard to break