The Mueller Report (on the Investigation into Russian Interference ….) has been a tsunami in the news, permeating even my filter bubble. One aspect that I was surprised by was the number of organizations who re-published the report, which is itself a free government document available from the Special Counsel’s web page. Don’t get me wrong. Law libraries pay millions a year to access free government documents, so I’m not casting shade when the Washington Post, Penguin, and others sell into the public marketplace. I even know someone who paid $8 for a Kindle copy of the report. Which made me wonder why, situated where we are, law libraries aren’t doing this more regularly themselves?
I don’t see law libraries publishing in competition with any commercial provider. I think that the editorial enhancements legal publishers provide have some value and require people (whether editors or developers) to achieve. On the other hand, a lot of what lawyers use is commodity free legal information, which is why some lawyers may not see the need to pay for a provider.
It’s fair to say that I think the amount law libraries spend on supporting the wider business goals of legal publishers (especially to support their non-legal publishing endeavors, as print purchases buoy bottom lines in other verticals) is not in line with the value received. But that’s a topic for another day.
Foundations
As I say, a law library of any type is situated at an advantageous point to act as a periodic publisher. The general idea is this:
- the base is a government document, like the Mueller Report.
- the law library-provided enhancements are hyperlinks to cited (or uncited) relevant resources that are accessible by the audience: links to Supreme Court cases, current regulations, whatever.
- optional: if possible, lawyer- or media-derived commentary that supports the understanding of the government document. Lawyers publishing to Mondaq or Law360 and law faculty doing media interviews or op-eds would be ideal. These people don’t need to be part of your organization to participate.
The workflow is not very difficult to imagine, although where you work may impact it. I’ve already blogged about some of this from the perspective of getting to and from an ebook format with Microsoft Word and WordPress. These are common enough tools that, plus the open source Sigil editor, a very rudimentary knowledge of HTML, and some time, it is simple to work up a process for how to turn a government document into an ebook.
Law firms running SharePoint could use a shared document to host the government document and then attach enhancements. Lawyers and librarians could contribute to a single file, which is then exported for final preparation. Law libraries not running SharePoint could look at platforms like Pressbooks. The benefit of running this first through a web site is that it may make updating (if that’s a goal) easier.
Marketing staff could handle improved covers and help to tailor the product to a target client – or potential client – group. There may be a practice area group that works in a rapidly changing landscape for which this sort of resource would be a useful client development tool.
The last step would be distribution. Creating a Kindle Direct Publishing account is easy if your audience can use a Kindle book. You might also consider Apple’s iBook store if you have an iPad-using audience. Those of us in courthouse law libraries might consider licensing the ebook through the Overdrive or Cloudlibrary platforms, which could put our texts in front of a tax-paying audience. You can obviously host your own ebook on your law library web site
The more I think about this, the clearer it is to me that it’s not the how that might make you stop and think. It’s the why. Why dedicate resources which may already be limited to this sort of activity? I mean, the documents are free anyway!
Address the Why
There are two, maybe three, reasons that seem to be universal. You may find that your context offers additional reasons or negates these. But I think there’s a marketing angle, a revenue angle, and an information access angle.
The marketing angle is perhaps the easiest, particularly if you’re in a law firm or academic law library. It is a way to create a resource that matches a government document with enhanced commentary from lawyers and professors who are perhaps already well-known in the field. The resulting ebook can then be shared to an audience that may not be looking for legal services at that moment but might mean they think of you when they are.
The marketing aspect works for non-profit law libraries, like those in courthouses. If you’re taking a state or local law or government report that has some notoriety – to farmers, businesses, whatever audience – and creating a unique offering from your law library, it can show that you’re doing more than book tending and gate keeping. It is hard to show – and battle perceptions – that law libraries are proactive and not just reactive. This may be a way to overcome that.
The revenue angle isn’t a big one but it’s worth putting out there. Publishing has costs. You can manage those costs in this sort of flow, since most of your costs are already sunk (computers, staff). You could aim to recoup those costs through sales. You could add enhancements and use revenue to offset the cost of improvements.
In most cases, revenue generation would be akin to overdue fines, or CLE seminar registrations. It wouldn’t create a huge pot of money but it might be enough to allow your law library to do something it currently can’t.
The last is the information access angle. When I heard that someone I knew had bought the Mueller report, I was (for a moment) aghast that someone would pay for a free PDF. But I think I was missing the point:
- a free PDF is only useful if you know how to find it. People know how to find Amazon and iBooks apps on their tablets and phones and ebook readers more easily than they can find an obscure government PDF.
- the transactional cost ($0.99 or $9.99 or whatever) of getting the document is now within the normal realm people expect to pay for something digital. Whether for impulse control reasons or for convenience, they are willing to pay that price.
When there is an important legal change, there is an opportunity to give the legal information an extra push. Whether licensing for profit or just for public access through the local public library ebook platform, it may give people access to resources they didn’t know how to find. And perhaps even highlight you as a resource they didn’t know existed.