Amazon's Kindle
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Berkman Center for Internet & Society's Gene Koo
LAW SCHOOLS
Eyeing 'e-books' for future law students
Electronic casebooks discussed; copyright, piracy issues a concern.
September 22, 2008
Law professors and publishing executives plan to meet later this month in Seattle to discuss how legal casebooks could be made available electronically on a widespread basis, particularly on new handheld devices such as Kindle and Sony Reader Digital Book.
Those attending the event said electronic casebooks would lighten a student's heavy load and allow professors to customize the materials they require in their courses.
Inherent in the discussion, however, are concerns about copyrights and the ability to protect electronic casebooks from piracy. Others note that devices such as Kindle and Sony Reader Digital Book, while applicable for leisure reading, do not allow users to highlight or write notes in the same way they would with a traditional casebook.
The session is scheduled for Sept. 27 and organized by Edward L. Rubin, dean of Vanderbilt University Law School; Ronald K.L. Collins, scholar in the Washington office of the First Amendment Center; and Dean Kellye Testy and Professor David Skover of Seattle University School of Law, where the event is taking place.
"The purpose of the workshop is to help develop a new generation of law school course books," said Collins. "The real shift in legal education will occur when we move away from these tomes called law school casebooks to e-books, which are databases in cyberspace where materials are downloaded onto electronic readers, be they Kindle or Sony."
Kindle, which is sold through Amazon.-com Inc., already offers some legal titles.
And West, owned by Thomson Reuters Corp., launched its first electronic casebook, Civil Procedure: A Contemporary Approach, by A. Benjamin Spencer, last year, said Chris Parton, vice president of academic publishing at West.
Next year, West plans to add six more titles.
Collins said he expects that in three to five years, "this could be the reality," and "the books that law students are carrying around now would be a thing of the past."
Much of the push for electronic casebooks is coming from law professors who want more control over the materials they use in their classrooms.
Matthew Bodie, associate professor at Saint Louis University School of Law, who is attending the workshop, said publishers should steer clear of simply making existing casebooks available electronically as they are. Instead, they should consider open-source software, which would let professors make their own modifications electronically to a casebook.
He said "different professors would use it to mix and match to create their own casebooks. It would all be free and open and there wouldn't be any copyright claims."
Gene Koo, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, said law professors already are getting into electronic publishing in a limited way by hosting classroom Web sites with discussion boards and electronic files. Several are encouraging greater use of electronic casebooks for their own titles, many of which are not being published at fast enough speeds in an emerging marketplace, he said.
Most professors require students to purchase their supplements to casebooks.
"Every professor is already a microauthor, in a sense publishing his own remix of that casebook by supplementing it," Koo said.
Still 'primitive'
But the conversion to electronic casebooks continues to present challenges.
"The devices are still very much primitive," Koo said. "If you look at the physical size of a normal law school casebook and Kindle, you'll see a huge difference. When I was in law school, I scribbled the hell out of my casebook. That's much harder to do in the Kindle."
Parton of West said publishers are concerned that copyright agreements with authors do not involve digital media and that the market acceptance of such devices remains unclear. Also, electronic casebooks must be available but, at the same time, limited in distribution in order to remain secure, he said.
Unlike publishers of novels with mass-market appeal, publishers of casebooks are more likely to have concerns about protecting their niche market with limited sales, said Mark Giangrande, legal research specialist at DePaul University College of Law, and editor of the Tech Law Prof Blog.
Giangrande raised an additional practical issue.
"One of the problems I have with Kindle is not that it's a bad device, but you have students carrying laptops already," he said. "Do they need a second device to carry around casebooks?"
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