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.
[Image 
scurzuzu.]
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