Everybody is all aTwitter (can I say that now? I mean is it copyrighted or patented or something?) about Google Scholar having case law on it. Wahoo! After all, how can you resist a title that says: “Will Google soon own law?” I swear, in one day, the number of posts on the Tubes, Twitter, and FriendFeed were enough to make you wonder if someone had discovered the Blessed Mother gave birth to twins or something.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s terrific that The Goog is offering case law research now, but please try not to get ahead of yourselves. As best as I can tell, it doesn’t have any new case law on it, which means it is of limited value as a research platform. You know, if you’re a lawyer trying to find recent pronouncements from your Supreme Court or Court of Appeals on a relevant point that you’re briefing, like now. It’s terrific if the law has been assigned a cite … by Westlaw. Wait, I thought we were trying to get away from those bastards. Ooops, I guess not … yet, anyway. And Rick Klau or Ed Walters aren’t coughing up any info either. I’m waiting fellas. And a big shout out to Richard Leiter for his minor expose on the similarities of The Goog’s database to Westlaw.
Honestly, I love me some Google Scholar case law though. I’ve been using it all day today, and for cases that have been assigned to a reporter, it’s great. It gives me what I want, quickly and simply. I’m a power user of online research sites, but I don’t need a lot of bells and whistles to find what’s relevant. Having it delivered fast (and FREE!) is huge. And Scholawer will do that.
But guess what? I still need something that is going to give me the most recent cases. And that means the Big 2.5 (Welexislaw <– totally made that shit up) still have nothing to worry about. At least until The Goog gets current opinions online, but knowing what I know about that system, I don’t see it happening anytime soon. [I'd seriously make it the Big 3, but Bloomberg still isn't giving me access to their content yet, so fuck them.] I would also like batch printing, which took Loislaw years (and I mean years) to implement, and dual-column support. Citators, like Shepards or KeyCite are a different issue. Loislaw’s Global Cite has worked fine as long as you can read and digest cases quickly to know what is and is not relevant, and I suspect that The Goog’s How Cited feature will operate similarly. Honestly, there’s lots of ways to knock the offering, but hey it’s FREE! And given The Goog’s history, you have to figure it will only get better once they determine how advertising revenue will be generated from all of our searches. All the sidebar stuff is noise anyway, amiright?
If somehow you’ve been stuck in a hole since Monday, there’s only one post you should read and that is Don Cruse’s here. The guy is legend now with his post, and one of the best on The Goog’s efforts in this space.
As an aside, we had a great Wave going on about The Goog here. If you don’t know what a Wave is, well, I’m sorry, you’re practice is doomed and you should rededicate your life to social media. If you do, but don’t have an invite, drop me a comment and I’ll send you one.
[Image by C. Pedersen.]
Honestly, this is still one of my favorites.
Continuing my response to Professor Volokh’s series on ebooks, his third post briefly raises some interesting technological issues for hardware manufacturers, and actually highlights the problems with widespread adoption of the platform.
1. Readability. I disagree with the Prof. on readability. I think one of the great advantages to eInk is the fact that you can read it without eye strain. It’s actually quite good. But really only if you’re into long-form reading, which for law students is important, but perhaps less so for lawyers on the go who just want a portable library for the court, etc. I think OLED screens running eReader software like the Kindle that allows you to switch fonts, different colored text and backgrounds (e.g., black on sepia is a nice combo for reading), and screen brightness make for some good short-form reading. One important point to make here is that reading reading off an eReader can get somewhat tedious and boring; grey can be depressing.
2. Charts, illustrations, and the like. Yes, yes, and yes. eReaders are terrible, horrible, at rendering charts and illustrations. Each new iteration has gotten better, but they are no where near online. And they never will be as long as they are using eInk.
3. Annotating, highlighting, sharing. Do we need to even talk about this? Have you tried using the Kindle DX keyboard? How about Sony’s? Oops. What a disaster. I have seen no implementation of annotating or highlighting (communal sharing is not supported at this time, which for law student study groups would be hugely beneficial) that I think is worthwhile. So Prof. Volokh’s call to manufacturers to make it better is a good one. I’m not sure about the stylus based input, but I think I see where he’s going with it. Maybe we’d be better talking about how the Courier tablet concept could work in this space. I would love to show up to a deposition with one of those things in hand. Holy cow.
4. Page numbers. I’m a bit confused about the page number argument. I think there’s some issue that what you see on an eReader should match a printed text (because some students are using print), but I thought the whole point to migrating was not to have printed texts. So why would it matter? Also, the whole benefit to eBooks, whether on a dedicated eReader or through an app on a tablet or on the web, is dynamic re-flow. Need to adjust the font size? No problem, the text reflows. As long as the reader knows where they are in a document (which is more about the book’s structure), page references are irrelevant. And I’m pretty sure no one working in XML is going to take the time to manually insert page numbers; one of the reasons for moving to XML was so we could stop worrying about manual page layout. (Can I hear a shout out for XPP? Woot!)
5. Search. As long as there are eReaders, search will never be anything more than character string searches. That’s it. Don’t get your hopes up for anything more than that. Wait for the weblets. Hardware manufacturers are not going to pay a lot of money for a robust search engine on their devices. Nope. Not gonna happen. Just keep moving along folks, nothing to see here.
[*A "weblet" is a web-enabled tablet device. Although some people also think it's this. Bah.]
And not a moment too soon. Today our favorite gadgety blogs (Gizmodo and Engadget) revealed that Innovative Converged Devices will be releasing 7-, 11-, and 15-inch tablet devices running Android 2.0, Wi-Fi b/g, Bluetooth, and be offered through a “Tier” cellular carrier the first half of 2010. As I’ve said before, once we start seeing these things, it’s going to be just like the netbook and eReader explosion; they’ll be everywhere. And once they’re everywhere, the shortcomings of eReaders will be fully revealed. I can’t wait for the invasion of the weblets. This is going to be fun.
[Image 
nDevilTV]
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.
A few days ago Lexis released an iPhone app designed to do two things: get a case and Shepardize it. And guess what? It pretty much does that. There aren’t too many screens to fiddle with either. And it’s free, as long as you are a current Lexis subscriber.
When you start it up, the app defaults to a search screen, like this:
Plug in your cite (note, it’s possible that it’s having problems recognizing abbreviations for reporters, but I can’t confirm that right now), hit “Get a Document,” and this is what you get:
If you haven’t saved your login information, the app will ask you to do it and then retrieve your cite. Once the case loads, you can scroll up and down. The case is formatted just the way you’d see it on Lexis. And it loads pretty quickly too. Linking to cases, rules, statutes, etc. has been disabled though.
Notice at the top of the screen you can select a new search or to Shepardize. If you hit Shepardize, here’s what you’ll get:
Obviously from there, you can retrieve additional citing docs. Overall, it does pretty much what you’d expect it to and a lot faster than trying to find something online through Safari.
[All screencaps Copyright © 2009 LexisNexis]
I’m trying to figure out just how much metadata lawyers want in their electronic treatises. A lot of folks blather on about meta, meta, meta, but at some point it’s TMI particularly if your writing is already really tight, which ours is. Don’t get me wrong, good metadata allows for efficient discovery. And in the context of legal books, there’s the obvious stuff like cases, statutes, rules, and maybe secondary sources (and the breakdowns associated with that info). But what else does a lawyer want? Terms of art? Common words? Definable terms? Thematic phrases (e.g., in the context of privileges something like “confidential communication”)? If the meta can facilitate search (whether faceted or otherwise) and speed up the process for finding “the answer” (BIG IF: assuming it’s there), then what is it a lawyer wants? The question is important because I’d love to stop tagging at some point.
I have my personal preferences, and honestly, right now current treatise meta stops at a very superficial level. Most publishers are simply “linking cases” and rules, and dumping text into search. That’s about it. It seems to me that advancements in search only gets us so far. Meta is needed to get us the extra mile. A good example is the West Key Number system. But even then it stops short of finding the best connections among content.
So what do you want? And if you don’t know what metadata is, I guess the only thing I can say is please comment below so I won’t refer any cases to you.
[Image misterbisson]
As I noted in an earlier post, Professor Volokh’s (”PV”) has done a nice series on e-Books (we’ll just refer to it as “Volokh on eBooks”) in anticipation of an introduction he’s writing for the Michigan Law Review. In his first post on the subject, he had this to say:
Electronic distribution will reduce cost, increase choice, and increase convenience. And in the process it will not only facilitate access to existing material, but will also promote the production of more material.
I’ve been thinking about this quote for some time. He’s not the first to say this in connection with electronic books, or more correctly, e-readers. But with every person who mentions something like this (at least in the context of law), I’m trying to figure out what happened to things like Folio, LawDesk (still use it!), Westlaw, Lexis, CEB Online, Hein Online, and on, and on, and the host of other publishers who provide content electronically and have been doing so for decades. We are not a profession that has been without electronic books. [Aside: I remember getting Butterworth's Court Charge Reporter on CD-ROM for the first time, pulled it up on my Gateway desktop with the massive 14" CRT, and thought I was in heaven.] So, I’m curious as to why now, all of a sudden, we’re talking about electronic distribution, cost reduction, and increased choice and convenience as if it’s a new thing. It isn’t. The only thing that has changed is how quickly and differently you can get things on the Tubes. And that has nothing to do with e-Readers. Computers were the first great equalizer for publishing (my company is a terrific example, and do you remember the catchphrase “desktop publishing”?), and the web has been the next. But e-Readers are simply a by-product of what you’ve had access to for years, just untethered from the Tubes, sort of. The biggest difference, of course, is the fact the law books are less useful on that $300 piece of hardware you’re now holding in your hand. And that’s because they are metadata rich (really rich), and e-Readers are terrifically awful at giving you access to it. In fact, e-Readers are outright stupid. No, e-Readers will not reduce cost, increase choice, or increase convenience. But the web will, and connected, smart devices will play a roll in how you access that data. In my following posts to PV’s series, I will tell you why.
I do agree with PV on one thing: e-Reader is an awkward name. Honestly, e-Book is just as awkward. But I think we’re stuck with them until someone comes up with a better moniker.
[Image gunthert]
My friend Ed Schipul, has a terrific piece on “The Personal Brand Era.” You should read it. In fact, I encourage you to solicit him. Not because I count him among my friends, but because the guy is seriously smart and dedicated to his craft in a way that these “oh, hey, I’m a social media expert” folks could never be. In fact, I think Ed would even meet Scott Greenfield’s criteria for being a “social media guru,” which is a tall order (and despite the fact that he isn’t a lawyer, which in my book is a plus). And despite what anyone might say to you, if you are a lawyer and are not concerned with your “personal brand” in the age of the stream, you should be.
As I look over my posts, it turns out I might not be too concerned.