With
a growing number of law publishers converting their traditional print sources
into E-books, a question arises: Could buying the electronic version of your
traditional text book be a better call? In the future, will we see students
pulling out their tablets in the library to turn the pages of Farnsworth on
Contracts, or Kathleen Sullivan’s Constitutional Law casebook? Will the days of
frantically highlighting every sentence of the casebook by hand, including the
dicta you don’t yet realize is worthless, come to a close? Will those scribbled
notes on the margins of my Criminal Law textbook cease to exist? Will the days
of renting and selling-back books be over?
The answer to this question is: not yet. A 2014 study found that 87%
of students spent their money on print books as opposed to only 9% on E-books.
But this could merely be because professors don’t assign books with E-versions
(not likely to be the case in the future) or mandate the students buy the print
source. Nonetheless, it isn’t too soon to analyze the merits of each source.
This post will focus on the benefits of the E-book.
As
many of my friends know, I am a huge fan of E-books. Still, I only bought one
law-book on my kindle, and that was an Understanding Criminal Law supplement. I
really enjoyed reading this supplement on my kindle and can’t really explain
why I never bought another one besides the fact that print-sources just seem to
be customary. Maybe it was because I didn’t want to get cold-called in class
and have my kindle die on me or freeze up when trying to find the holding of a
case. But the truth is I never compared the benefits of each source in a
reasoned manner; however, upon further reflection, I’ve realized the E-book has
some incredible advantages.
For
one, they are light-weight! If we consolidated all are 1000 page textbooks into
a single tablet, my chronic back pain may have never come about. The federal
consumer Product Safety Commission recently found that carrying a 12-pound
backpack to and from school and lifting it 10 times a day for the entire year
results in a cumulative load on our bodies of 21,600 pounds—roughly the
equivalent of six sedans!
Also, you don’t have to hunch over
your textbook highlighting for hours at a time with your neck crooked.
The next advantage ties into the last one, and it’s that you have all
your resources in one portable, compact device. You can read in places where
pulling out a massive textbook and highlighting would neither be convenient nor
possible—a car, plane, or bus. Man, if I could have hit up my Civ Pro text on
the trip back to school after thanksgiving break, I for sure what have got a
better grade.
The
next advantage is my absolute favorite and one of the main reasons I read
non-law books on a kindle—you can look up any word at the tap of your finger
with the built-in dictionary.
This advantage is particularly relevant to 1L’s who are bombarded by legalese
and antiquated terms from day one. I still remember reading some of those oddly
worded contract terms in my UCC supplement (anticipatory repudiation?) the day
before my first contracts class—I had never heard of half these words. And
don’t let me get started on Marbury vs. Madison, how could you even
know what that case was about with all those archaic terms?
Further, you can look up a legal concept on Wikipedia or in Google by
highlighting the term and clicking search. This tool allows easy access to legal
sources on Google like legal-dictionary.com, and this would have been
incredibly useful during 1L and currently. I think it is much more likely that
a student will highlight and click a term than search the term separately on
their computer.
Next, books by Lexis or Westlaw give you direct hyperlinks to those
legal databases from an E-reader. This is useful for the extra ambitious
student who wants to do further research on cited cases, statutes, or law
review journals.
In treatises, like the Understanding Series, the footnotes are not
cluttered at the bottom, but instead at the end of next section, which I think
greatly enhances readability. To
the same point, you can adjust settings on your E-reader to further enhance
readability by increasing the margins to augment the white space—which Bryan
Garner says makes the text look more inviting and roomy.
You can also change font and make other revisions to the text.
E-readers also include the ability to use a shortcut tool—like Ctrl-
F—to find any word or phrase you want in the text. It happens far too often,
mainly when writing papers, that I remember a concept from a textbook,
treatise, or the like, but cannot find it in the book—the E-book helps
remediate this issue. I suppose one could also use this tool to quickly educate
themselves when a professor begins speaking about an unheard of concept.
The last advantage I found is that you can often sample E-books before
buying it. I know this is true for the Kindle but my hunch is that this is also
the same for other E-readers out there, especially ones that sync up to Amazon.
This is beneficial to those students wanting to try out supplements before purchasing
to make sure the format and style of the supplement resonates well with you. I
talked about how you are going to “click” better with some supplements over
others in my previous post. The ability to sample the E-book can help expedite
your supplement-selection process and save you a trip to the library—and
consider that your library may not carry every supplement or the current
edition.
Well, I intended this post to include both the pros and cons of
E-books as well as the pros and cons of printed text, but I got a little
carried away because of my love for E-books. I will address these neglected
issues in later posts under the same title: E-Reader or Print?
If I have
persuaded you to forego waiting for the next posts and just go ahead and buy a
kindle now, I am attaching a link to Amazon for the one that I have. Note, I am
an Amazon affiliate and receive a commission for your purchase.
