I want to make something clear about my responses to Professor Volokh’s series on eReaders and the law. Like many publishers, I feel like I might be tilting somewhat at windmills here given the explosion of eReaders on the market. Here’s a rundown on most of the eReaders available on the market now (I might have missed some):

Alex
Barnes & Noble Nook
Brother SV-100B
Cool-ER
Cybook Gen3
Cybook Opus
Ditto Book
Ectaco jetBook
Elonex eReader
eSlick
Flepia
Hanlin eReader V2
Hanlin eReader V3
Hanlin eReader V5
Hanvon Handybook N516
Hanvon N518
Hanvon N520
Hanvon N526
iRex Digital Reader 1000/S
iRex iLiad Book Ed.
iRex iLiad 2d Ed.
Kindle Original
Kindle 2
Kindle DX
Mentor
Pocketbook 301
Pocketbook 360
Samsung Papyrus
Sony Pocket Edition
Sony Reader Daily Edition
Sony Reader Touch Edition
Soribook
Txtr reader

When you see the list, it’s like “crap, what are we going to do now?” And that’s why legal publishers have to speak up. It’s not that eReaders are bad per se, they aren’t. But they are influencing the way consumers look at books, and they aren’t what lawyers and law students should settle for. We need, and deserve better. This is my point to responding to Professor Volokh’s posts. It’s not that he’s wrong, it’s that he’s settling for a technology, that while new and Whedonesque “shiny,” the tech isn’t ideally suited for our profession. Consequently, legal publishers need to be designing for what is needed.

In his second post, Professor Volokh sets forth several “arguments” for eReaders. These arguments, IMHO, are bested by a portable, touch tablet running an actual OS (say, iPhone 4.0, Snow Leopard, Windows 7, or Android 2.0). We’ll just call this device the “tReader.”

1.  The portability argument. Yes, it is true that eReaders can carry hundreds of books. And guess what? So will a tReader. In fact, a tReader is unlimited because it will be a cloud-based device, not tied to any particular proprietary format. I agree that the limitations created by books (size, weight) is important. In fact, it is a guiding principle of book taxonomy: what do you include in your table of contents (TOCs) and why? It’s certainly been a huge influence on our products, particularly our annotated codes plus series.  TOCs are no small matter, and a significant amount of thought and debate with other practitioners and authors goes into each title. In the end, TMI can be a problem though. And eReader doesn’t solve the access issue. It simply allows you to carry around a lot of information. Accessing it, however, is a different story.

2.  The immediacy argument. The fact that you can access your library immediately is simply an extension of portability. And immediacy is only as good as your virtual environment, which on eReaders is weak. A tReader on the other hand brings a full OS experience, and all the benefits that entails.

3.  The finding-of-such-things argument. Again, the ability to find books, which is still weak on eReaders given the order of titles you’re forced to page through, is just another extension of the portability argument.

4.  The ease-of-purchase argument. It’s easy to purchase title from Amazon on the Kindle. It’s a bit more of a pain in the ass to do it through the Sony store. I don’t have a Nook yet, so I can’t say what the buying experience with Barnes & Noble is like. But I can tell you, as a legal publisher, I won’t agree to discounting my books by 60 to 65% for Amazon. It won’t happen. I suspect most other legal publishers won’t either, no matter how convenient you think it is. So, if you want get legal books on your eReader, you’ll have to tether it somehow, whether by phone or USB. Either way, it won’t be as easy as the Kindle system, which for general reading, I love. But with a tReader, that’s a different story. Odds are, you’ll be paying a cell carrier for a data plan, and with your unlimited access to the Tubes, you’ll be able to get whatever legal content you want, when you want it. How great is that?

5.  The usability argument. There are too many people talking about the lack of eReader usability now to properly address this argument. To highlight though, eReaders can’t take advantage of metadata, which is essential in the legal publication market. And even if they could, your one-time payment for accessing a cellular network for the life of the device will not entitle you to link out to the web (at whatever pace) to read rules, statutes, cases, etc. It just won’t happen without a data plan. But again, a tReader can make that happen, and will. Even better, it will be touchy, so you can just tap a link with your finder to call it up. Just like on the iPhone, but better because it will actually be legible.

6.  The searchability argument. eReaders don’t search. I say that because neither does Word or pdf. Search in the legal world is intelligent, not dumb. Looking for a string of characters and having to tab through to find the right ones does not amount to effective search. Basic needs such as Boolean or natural language search must be met, otherwise we’ll be dissatisfied. Search needs to access the metadata buried in each book, give us faceted results to narrow our choices, etc. Anything less is a waste of time. And a book (that’s the printed kind), that is well organized, tightly written with a good TOC and index can beat dumb search everytime.

7.  The translation argument. I suppose there are services that can translate English texts into foreign languages, but I suspect those would be much more robust on a tReader than an eReader. If we’re just looking at eReaders though, publishers are going to have to rely on the hardware manufacturer to embed that in their system, think Kindle with New Oxford. The hardware manufacturers would have to contract with translation services and, for example, Thomson Reuters for access to Black’s, and embed those dictionaries on the device. Unless there is some radical change in technology, I don’t see anything really happening on the eReader front with translation services. tReaders, however, could have access to all sorts of translation services (granted, both good and bad), including the ubiquitous Black’s Law Dictionary.

8.  The cost reduction argument. This gets a brief mention in the article, but is really saved for a later post. I won’t tackle the issue here, but there is much to say about consumer’s perception of the cost of producing a legal title, which is not as much as you (consumer) think it is.