My first book came out as both a paper object and a digital one. In 2010, the digital e-book (a DRM‘d PDF) was a bit novel, one of the first the legal publisher had attempted. I’ve been curious about what role, if any, e-books have in legal information since then. I’ve created some e-books and am not surprised by the plateau of the e-book market. Their strengths do not distinguish them and the lack of delivery tools for law libraries continue to inhibit their place in the collection.

The media around e-books is interesting to watch. This Techdirt piece does a good job of looking back over the last decade or so. The initial hype has moderated to a realization that, while the ebook format has some nice functionality, it isn’t a complete replacement for print formats. The Association of American Publishers finds December 2021 hardbacks and paperback sales about the same, with ebook sales about 1/3d of either. They also note that, while hardbacks and paperbacks both grew in sales for all of 2021, ebooks dropped by about 5% from 2020 sales.

Chart from the Association of American Publishers showing trade sales in December 2021 from their December 2021 AAP StatShot.

The legal publishing world is not the trade book world, though. It’s been 20 years since Overdrive and Palm partnered on the Palm reader and 15 since the first Amazon Kindle. The legal publishing e-book strategy has been late and fractured. Unfortunately, their ebooks have not been distinguishable from any linear trade text. In many cases, “ebooks” are delivered as web-based content through proprietary interfaces and sometimes submerged within larger research databases.

The reason I contrast linear books from legal research texts is because, after law school, it’s been my experiance that it is less common for a researcher to read a book from cover to cover in a linear fashion. Law students (and others) can access the free CALI eLangdell ebooks for that purpose. But law library collections of ebooks are most likely to be used in pieces, even if they are still designed in a linear fashion like their print analogs.

Ebook Benefits

The ebook format is obviously different from a print format. But in creating a digital analog, the differences in the container both impact what is read and how it is read. The continued linear approach to creating ebook texts – which reflects an assumption that the way text is provided in a physical format is the only way it can be provided digitally – means that there’s not a lot to differentiate the formats.

One aspect is the ability to store and retrieve large numbers of ebook objects on a single portable device. I use the word “store” because you often are not buying those books (see Amazon Kindle terms of service as an example). So, while you may store them for the period of their license, you can only store them in the manner in which the vendor allows. For example, you are limited on how many copies of your licensed Amazon content you can use on your own devices.

You are granted “a non-exclusive right to view, use, and display such Kindle Content an unlimited number of times, solely through a Reading Application”

Amazon Kindle Terms of Service

However, other than the license terms and other digital rights management applied to the ebook object, you can store as many as you have space for on your device. Since space is an expense in a law firm or law library context, the potential for space-saving is substantial. I don’t consider web-based ebook objects to be a space saver. You can’t store them and it requires you to have an online connection in order to use the object.

Unlike a print format object, you can also use digital tools to navigate your ebook object. A good book index and table of contents can help you find what you are looking for in a book. But sometimes you are looking for something so granular that the ability to do a keyword search across the book is really useful. A case law citation in a text that has no table of cases, for example. Or a term of art that is omitted from an index.

The downside is that some ebook publishers now no longer provide indices, perhaps because of the ability to search for words. This ignores the power of a good index to identify concepts that are not amenable to keyword searching. You win some, you lose some.

A key benefit for legal publishing ebook objects is the ability to direct link to cited sources, especially primary law. You no longer need to write down a case citation; you can just click to it. Although, as I found trying to add links to an ebook built from a Canadian government digital asset called CharterPedia, that assumes the citations are right. It also assumes your reader has online access, even if, as I discuss below with Thomson Reuters content, you can get an offline version.

Some of the benefits we attribute to ebooks are actually a function of the device on which they are used. How light your Kindle or other digital device is will vary, although it will almost certainly be lighter than a print format object. I don’t really see this is a differentiator; a heavier print book can be placed on a surface to offset its weight. Some of these differences between ebook and print formats are preference rather than a functional difference.

Delivery Limitations

The issue highlighted above with Amazon – you license content, it can live on a limited number of devices – sums up the general challenge for law libraries. There is often an assumption with ebook publishers, legal and trade, that there is a one-to-one relationship between the publisher and the purchaser. A law firm may be able to replicate this, buying a license that allows many lawyers, who can be discretely identified by a username and password, to borrow licensed content.

This is harder in environments like courthouse law libraries. We rarely have content that is tied to a user account for each individual who might need legal information access. Just as law firms and law schools do, we use IP authenticated content to get around this need to have discrete user accounts for each researcher. We have nearly 70,000 potential legal professional users in Ontario; account management on that scale is beyond our resources.

Unlike the print format object, which usually relies on Eyeball Mark I, ebook objects are constrained by their digital framework. Thomson Reuters Proview licensees who want to access an ebook outside a web browser will need to comply with certain operating system requirements. Irwin Law ebook licensees will need to have a reader that supports their DRM solution, Adobe Digital Editions (which also has a 6 device cap like Kindle).

For example, let’s consider a courthouse law library that wants to license an ebook and make it available to its researchers. It can’t create an account for each person. But it could potentially create a lending system (in-library or otherwise) where it loads tablets with a compatible ebook reader and titles.

There’s a good chance it will require multiple apps to accommodate each legal publishers’ texts. Those titles will need to be regularly updated (assuming the apps don’t auto-update). Any annotations or notes on usage will need to be wiped after each use, for privacy and usability reasons. Be kind, rewind, that sort of thing.

You may also run into usage caps, though. If a publisher says that a license allows for 6 devices, you may be adding multiple licenses if you want more than 6 circulating tablets. The hurdles aren’t large, but they’re big enough that it gives ebook object adoption a lot of friction.

Because the alternative is to use what the legal publishers already have, which is web-based texts that contain the same content as their ebook objects. Thomson Reuters even calls their web-based content Proview. Their new interface gives the ability to download an offline copy, apparently.

Proview Next web site, showing Canadian legal title. New Download function appears next to existing Create PDF function (renamed Share) on top right toolbar

I don’t really understand the point. The offline function doesn’t work unless you’re entirely offline, so the use case seems pretty small (laptop users out of data/wifi range). It’s also browser tied, so if you cut and paste the URL from the browser you downloaded in, and open the URL in another browser while offline, you just get an error message.

As a side note, I had to laugh out loud at the password advice the download process offers. I guess it makes sense to password protect an ebook on your device if you’re embedding case or client confidential information in your annotations. But you definitely should not be changing that password every 90 days. That advice is years out of date.

Thomson Reuters Proview download offline authentication warning to create a password. Lawyers going to lawyer.

Fortunately, an offline version doesn’t block the ability to use an online version. I could see a researcher using a shared device creating a password-protected offline copy – probably because the Download and Share/Create PDF functions aren’t clearly differentiated – and then inhibiting other researchers from using the same text.

Which really brings us right back to a fundamental of courthouse law library information delivery: digital delivery happens primarily in the browser. A browser provides a generic container within which to view a variety of content, whatever the legal publisher calls it in their marketing materials. That means that licenses will need to continue to allow for IP authentication or some other indiscrete authentication mechanism and that researchers will have to have an always-on device to access that content.

I would not at all be surprised if we see a shift away from discrete, downloadable ebook objects in the legal publishing world. The people, especially funders, who want to see law library space reduction can be satisfied with any sort of digital container. A web site or database achieve the same space-saving result as an ebook. It has additional advantages in being potentially more accessible, as it can be “read” or converted into audio with assistive devices. It’s also probably fair to say that, at this point, the bloom is off the ebook rose.

That is probably a good thing. I haven’t seen any innovation in legal publishing ebook objects that would make them a suitable replacement for other formats. While people continue to use licensed copies of linear fiction and non-fiction titles, whether they pay directly to a publisher or as a taxpayer to their library, it would be good to see legal publishers focus on web-based digital content. There is greater scope for integrations, for innovation, for breaking out of the linear mindset that ebooks continue to occupy.