Electronic Casebooks?

Amazon’s release of the Kindle 2 reminded me of something I had pondered last year: electronic casebooks.

Don’t get me wrong. I get the same ego trip as you when I look up on my bookshelf and see those law books sitting there, high and mighty. I don’t get to be pretentious about much. I’ll take that.

Especially for the money I paid to kill all those trees.

But isn’t there a way to move away from paper? If I could download my casebooks onto a kindle, I’d love it. My back would be thankful.

Publishers could also update the casebooks much more easily and they could link to other resources online.

There could also be the possibility of allowing professors to easily complement the e-book with materials of their own. Schools could buy a sort of customizable book by paying a sort of licensing fee that would buy the right to make additions to the book to account for jurisdictional quirks, depending on where the school is located (like ours which is surrounding by three of the four contributory negligence jurisdictions).

Why isn’t this happening?

For one thing, there’s value in having the book. You’re more likely to pay attention to what you’re reading. Highlight it. Annotate it. Etc.

For another, publishers may not make as much money. Though you’d think the reduced overhead from printing and distribution would help in this regard.

But these are easy to overcome. The book could be downloaded into Word or another piece of software. It doesn’t have to be used on a Kindle (though that would be helpful) but could be on a sort of shared project site, like WestLaw’s TWEN or Blackboard.

The point is that, it seems the technology has advanced to a point where publishers can work around their concerns and law schools can actually take seriously the financial sacrifices students make to acquire the most basic of law school tools, the textbook.