The future of books related to the law?

• Author: Volokh, Eugene

People have been reading books for over 500 years, in more or less the same format. Book technology has changed in some measure during that time. Fonts have become more readable. Books have become more affordable. Still, the general form of the book has remained much the same.

But the arrival of e-readers, such as the Kindle 2 and the Sony eBook, offers the possibility of a major change. (1) First, people may shift to reading existing books on those e-readers. (2) Second, the shift may lead them to change the way they use books, for instance by letting people have many reference works at their fingertips. (3) Third, the shift may change the content of books. (4) And, fourth, the shift may change who publishes books, and sometimes which books are published. (5)

Home computers and laptop computers have caused all these effects, to a considerable degree, with other media. We see this, for instance, with newspapers, magazines, and new publications--such as blogs--that are in some ways the electronic descendants of magazines and newspapers. (6) But ereaders, with their greater portability and readability, may yield similar results for books and not just shorter-text media.

In this Foreword, I'll try to briefly sketch how these changes might play out as to books related to the law: textbooks, scholarly books, legal books aimed at laypeople, treatises, other practitioner reference books, and law student study tools. I'll also talk about what changes to the technology, and to the structure of the legal-book market, may be needed to capture the technology's possible benefits. (7)

The effects of the technological change will likely be varied. The shift from horses to cars, for instance, both allowed long-distance commuting and reduced the amount of manure on the streets, (8) yet the two are hard to link through a grand theory. But many of the effects will point in the direction in which electronic distribution tends to change the media generally: towards reducing cost, increasing choice, and increasing convenience. (9) And in the process electronic distribution will not only facilitate access to existing material, but will also promote production of more material.

Naturally, this is speculation--wide acceptance of e-readers is only beginning, though the broader cyberspace media revolution is about fifteen years old. And I'll make it still more speculative by considering not just the current e-reader technology, but also foreseeable developments in that technology. (10) But I hope the speculation will still be helpful, both to curious observers and to those who are thinking of participating as authors in the evolution of the legal book.

1. WHY LEGAL BOOKS ARE LIKELY TO Go ELECTRONIC

   The paper book is a familiar and well-loved technology. It also has some advantages over e-readers, advantages that might endure for many years. The main advantages have to do with how much material one can see at once, without flipping a page or clicking a button. Paper books still let people see more text, on two open, largish pages, than can be seen on a modern e-reader screen. (11) And people can cheaply have several books or printouts in front of them at once. Few people are likely to buy several e-readers to duplicate that experience, until e-readers get as cheap as CD players have become over time. (12)

   But e-readers also offer material advantages over paper books, and are likely to offer still more within just a few years. This will be enough, I think, to lead most users of law books to eventually shift to e-readers, and especially to influence law students and young lawyers who are already used to reading many things on computers.

   First, e-readers are more portable than books. Hundreds of books' worth of data can fit on an e-reader that is the size of a hardcover book, and the weight of a paperback. (13) This is especially useful for law students who have to carry several books for their classes--a typical textbook weighs four pounds, (14) so a semester's worth of books can be a back-straining load (15)--and for lawyers who have to carry many books and other documents to court or on a trip. (The Kindle 2 lets you upload your own documents onto it for free, if you connect the Kindle to a computer and run a conversion program; and for fifteen cents you can e-mail a document to a special kindle.com address, where it will be automatically converted and sent wirelessly to your Kindle.)

   But e-readers don't just help people carry those books and documents that they're already carrying. Rather, e-readers also make books more immediately available. Lawyers could have all their favorite treatises and important statutory and regulatory sources constantly at hand. Students could always have their hornbooks or outlines, together with their textbooks.

   E-readers can make it easier to find the books you already have. All the books, and other materials such as downloaded articles or cases, are right there on the e-reader, available through its alphabetizable table of contents; you needn't spend time searching for that misplaced book. Of course, this assumes that you haven't misplaced the e-reader itself, but it's easier to keep track of one e-reader than of many items.

   E-readers make it easier to buy books, which can be selected in seconds and then downloaded in a few minutes. Of course, impulse buys are uncommon for law books. But this ties in to one more reason that many readers of law books might want to buy e-readers: e-readers are also useful for reading other books, newspapers, and the like, for which impulse buying and instant delivery can be important. As lawyers and law students buy ereaders for pleasure reading, they're likely to use them for legal reading as well.

   E-readers can also make each book more usable. First, they can make source material more available. Case or statute references in a treatise, for instance, could link directly to the text of the case or statute. This text could be distributed as part of the work, for especially important sources. Or the software could be designed to allow links to a Web database, such as Google Scholar's new legal opinions database, which could be reached through the e-reader's built-in cellular modern. Such a link would be slower than a link to an already-included appendix, or than a normal internet broadband connection. But it would be faster than going to the library or even to one's main computer to track down the source.

   E-readers also make books more searchable. This is especially helpful for reference works, but it's also useful for textbooks, and to some extent for scholarly works. If you're looking for a passage you remember, you can find it by just recalling a key word. Traditional indexes provide some such flexibility, but full-text search is quicker and generally more comprehensive.

   E-readers can help preserve the users' own marginal annotations from edition to edition, at least if the software is designed to allow this. For instance, if you write notes in your copy of an important statute or volume of regulations, you would lose those notes when you shift to a new edition, unless you're willing to hand copy them. But properly designed e-reader software could easily retain the annotations, while still providing access to the latest updates. (16)

   And e-readers can provide instant translation through built-in dictionaries, whether for English words, legal jargon, or foreign words. This is especially useful for foreign-language speakers who are studying or researching American law, for English speakers who are studying or researching foreign-language law, or for law students who need quick lookup of legal phrases. (The Kindle 2, for instance, lets you set any dictionary you buy as the primary dictionary, though it comes with a free New Oxford American Dictionary.)

   On top of this, e-readers have the potential to substantially reduce the cost of books. Going electronic will cut down on printing costs, shipping costs, and storage and distribution costs on the publisher side, plus the costs of shelving and operations at the bookstore. This should quickly offset the cost of the hardware. Law students, for instance, generally have to buy $400 or more worth of books each semester; if that bill is reduced by just 20% the savings will quickly exceed the $260 price tag--and there's every reason to think that e-reader prices will fall, just as prices for other hardware, from computers to CD players, have fallen, and just as today's Kindle 2 costs less than the original $400 Kindle did two years ago. (17) There's more on the cost issue, though, below.

2. WHAT MANUFACTURERS AND PUBLISHERS NEED TO Do TO FACILITATE A SHIFT TO ELECTRONIC READING

   Yet to make e-readers most effective, manufacturers and publishers have to improve their technology and their business models.

   1. Technological Barriers

      Let me begin with readability, probably the main (though not vast) disadvantage of current e-readers. E-readers are still not quite as legible as paper. The Kindle 2 is much better than earlier readers, such as the Rocket ebook from about ten years ago. Still, its dark-grey-on-light-grey contrast is not quite as clear as the contrast on paper. Books on the Kindle 2 are readable, but at least slightly less so than paper.

      Current e-readers also tend to reduce the size of illustrations, because of the smaller page size. (18) You can zoom in on part of an illustration, but that lets you see that part more clearly only at the expense of temporarily making other parts invisible. Either the screen needs to get clearer, or the electronic versions of books need to break up the illustrations in ways that maintain the illustrations' readability.

      Second, annotating and highlighting is still harder on e-readers than on ordinary books. On the Kindle 2, for instance, you have to hit a button several times to move the cursor to the words you want to highlight. To write notes in the margin, you have to type your...