Legal Research

I see the lawyer of the future - and (s)he?s carrying an eBook Reader

By scott

Nick Holmes over at Binary Law has an interesting piece of the impending doom that is print media - or at least traditional ‘hard copy’ print as we know it today.

In particular, he raises the question of the future of the future of legal publications such as Law journals (particularly the more scholarly ones) and asks if the move away from traditional hard copy print runs has them set for an early grave - at least in that format.

Now, I love print - there, I have said it. Yes, in some ways I am a ‘web geek’ and I love new technologies - I think I’d be lost without my iPhone (or similar) - but, in part, the love of the feel of books - their physicality, their smell, their magic is what drove me into the profession I choose for myself.

That said, Nick’s article got my brain thinking in a different way, and less focussed on the death of print and more about its rebirth in a legal context. I believe that the ‘end of print’ is a long way away, if it indeed ever happens; but the opportunities for exploiting a move into electronic delivery are still in their infancy, and if I was a legal publisher, then I would be seeing a big light at the end of the tunnel. Why?

The eBook Reader:

Yes, Amazon’s Kindle, Iliad, Sony PRS-505 and the rest. I think the scope for the success of eBook Readers within the law is vast. It is a technology that - it seems to me - is just made for the legal environment.

On a personal user level, whilst being impressed with Sony’s eBook Reader, for example, and loving how it works, I can never image wanting to carry around several hundred/thousand books around with me. A handful, yes, but not my entire library, and not certainly not in the same way that I’d want to carry a similar amount of music albums or films.

However, if I were a lawyer, who could have all the legal journals I wanted and all the legal texts I wanted - displayed as they would be in a ‘traditional’ print run - all on one device that I could keep in my desk or take with me to client meetings etc, then I would be a very happy bunny. Yes, some of these legal texts are already available electronically on Westlaw and Lexis, but they do not LOOK like books, they don’t let you engage with them as books, and as a result will never replace the book/loose-leaf. Keep them as a ‘book’ and THEN digitise them, keeping what makes books work and useable - good indexes etc - whilst adding the functionality of the modern technological world - search, highlight and note taking (post it note functionality) etc - and I think you would have gold.

Of course, the main legal publishers will probably follow the usual route of making their own devices with incompatible file formats so that you’ll always need more than one reader in the same way that Apple and Co did with digital music and Amazon and Sony etc are already doing with eReaders.

Do you think I am right? Is the eBook the future for legal publishing? Is legal (and most likley educational publishing in general) the one thing that could turn eBooks and eBook readers into serious business? Let me know.

Full post as published by Information Overload on February 25, 2009 (boomark / email).