If you don’t know, I love music. All kinds of it. I write to it constantly because it’s the only thing that keeps the noisy part of my brain occupied while I’m trying to think. And as far as music is concerned, I’m not a snob, unlike some of my employees who believe that unless you can do amazing things with a guitar (think SRV, Tom Morello, etc.)  or some other musical instrument, you’re a hack and your music sucks. No, I listen to it all, classical to the 09s.

{Note: As I write this, I am listening to (and watching with one eye) “From the Basement,” which is a fantasitc DVD.}

So I get home tonight and my daughter is listening to Panic! At The Disco, “But It’s Better If You Do.” As I walk in, the following refrain is coming over the speakers:

Praying for love in a lap dance, and paying in naivety.

The song has a good hook to it. There’s a lot of energy, and it’s something you can get lost in. It’s not the first time I’ve heard it, but it’s the first time I think—

Hmmmm. You know, the idea of eBooks is sexy. But it seems like everyone is rushing into this. Seriously. Why does everyone want eBooks all of a sudden?

Weird. I mean, how much of a friggin’ dork do you have to be to think that? Particularly after a full day of work. And yet, that’s what I thought. I now realize that it’s all Mike Cane’s fault. You see, he hates the entire idea of the so-called “eBook” movement (he calls it the Axis of E in fact). Kindles, Sony eReaders, Illiad’s, it doesn’t matter. It’s all crap. Design is thrown out the window. Metadata is irrelevant. Interactivity is disabled, killed. Amazon and Google are forcing us into digesting data linearly, but giving us nothing useful in return. Well, except that whole portability thing, which is where I think for most folks the sexy comes in. It’s the equivalent of a lap dance. I don’t think I need to say more on that.

We are so mesmerized right now with the idea of portability that we are willing to sacrifice what we really want: imaginative intelligence. It’s almost like canned music on the first iPod. Who cares if it doesn’t sound great, I’ve got a 1,000 songs in my pocket dood!

The law books I write are full of metadata, from cases, rules, statutes, secondary sources, forms, defined-terms, real-world examples, etc. And yet, lots of folks want this crap on a Kindle. Why? I seriously don’t get it. I mean, I do, but I don’t. I’ve heard the arguments for roaming and data connectivity, but those are countered by allowing for offline use.

Don’t you realize what you’re sacrificing by settling for eInk technology in it’s current state? Think about the song’s refrain again. Portability may be sexy, but at what cost? Isn’t it naive for us to think that eInk will somehow save us from escalating print costs, or library maintenance agreements, or subscription updates, or data plans, or sore backs? In the end, what do we think we are gaining? And in the process, what are we losing? If we adopt this current technology as the default platform for delivering law books, how long will we have to stick with it because we’ve all gone out and paid several hundred dollars for a one trick pony?

As a publisher, betting on eInk is significant because it requires me to spend money rendering a product in an ePub format and rely on a vendor that produces a piece of hardware from which you consume that data. And frankly, I don’t trust certain hardware vendors, particularly after the crap that Amazon pulled with the release of the Kindle 2 and DX within months of each other. And don’t even get me started on the Sony eReader, which I like build-wise, but can’t fathom why it’s tethered to a computer. Honestly, I would rather spend development dollars giving you a product (via the web or app or both) that satisfies my idea of imaginative intelligence criteria rather than a book in eInk Times New Roman (yes, I know you can deliver embedded fonts in pdfs on the DX, so don’t go on about it in a comment). Legal research is not linear. It never has been, even in the days when folks like us used annotations, digests, and secondary sources to find relevant authority. So why in the world would you want such limited accessibility of the products now?

The short answer is “sexy.” You’re caught up in the race, and thinking it’s fun being on the bleeding edge. You need those PLI books on a Kindle because it’s awesome to have eInk versions of law books. Well, stop. Take a step back, and ask yourself, what do you really want? What is my current legal content provider not giving me (in terms of books, not primary source material)? For example, isn’t Black’s Law Dictionary much more useful when you can click through to cited cases or hear pronouciations of words? If your answer is still eInk, then fine. But I think that answer is naive, particularly when we have the possibility of an Apple Table on the horizon. And with that, I’ll leave you with one other bit of the song:

I wouldn’t be caught dead, d-dead, d-dead in this place.