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Law Times • January 18, 2010 NEWS Jury out on e-readers Devices 'critical for our future' despite drawbacks BY BENJAMIN GLATT Law Times he world of law school textbooks and legal re- search has yet to find a suitable home in any of the current electronic readers. With the introduction of the Kindle e-reader from Amazon. com Inc., most Canadians now have the opportunity to down- load books and read them at their pleasure. Textbook pub- lishers, however, are waiting for the device that can truly deliver the feel of a print book — one that has the ability to be high- lighted, underlined, and anno- tated and that allows for clear illustrations and charts. "When that comes T out, you'll find a different reaction," says James Black, law school sales manager for Emond Montgomery Publications Ltd. "Right now, the e-readers are single functions, and skim- ming through fiction is very different than going through casebooks." One of the other issues a successful device must address is the ability to give off the im- pression that multiple books can be open at one time, as if they were all laid out on a table with the opportunity to make immediate references. While some devices do allow users to write notes, they can't write them in the margins for view- ing alongside the text. "It needs to be serviceable in your universe," Black says. "I could see it working with iSlate [the rumoured name for Apple Inc.'s unofficial tablet], where it would be much more inter- active with visual information and video material embedded right in it." But even then, his clientele must get used to working from an e-reader first. "We're not going to do this unilaterally. It will take as long as our customers are ready." Ken Saddington, a third- year law student and presi- dent of the University of Western Ontario's Student Legal Society, isn't entirely convinced he'll get used to studying from an e-book. "It would be great to have all [my books] with me at one time," he says. "But people now are just so accus- tomed to reading books on paper, and I like to write and highlight on the text." If all textbooks were avail- able on e-readers, students still might not be willing to make the transfer, Sadding- ton says. "I'd still like the option to get a paper copy and I think most students would agree. I often see students printing out PDF files just because they like the feel of it and want to take notes on it." Another idea that e-readers are trying to make obsolete — and an issue that could upset the student crowd — is the sale of used books. That's because once users buy a title, they can't resell or give it away. "I tend to keep [my books], but most students like to buy used books, and not being able to resell them would matter." A legal publisher's online re- search service, through which lawyers can look for books and then get a hit list in order to select only the part of the pub- lication they want to read, also wouldn't function well on any current e-reader. Amazon provides free wire- less connectivity for purchas- ing e-books, but users have to pay for using the Internet on the experimental browser that comes installed on Kindle. Ontario Lawyer's Phone Book 2010 Your most complete directory of Ontario lawyers, law fi rms, judges and courts With more than 1,400 pages of essential legal references, Ontario Lawyer's Phone Book is your best connection to legal services in Ontario. Subscribers can depend on the credibility, accuracy and currency of this directory year after year. 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But if a law firm were to Law student Ken Saddington isn't convinced of the viability of reading legal textbooks on an e-reader. "If you had a reader that had full Internet capability, then the sky is the limit. So you can not only read the text but you can interact with it," says Michael Jones, director of product and business development at Can- ada Law Book Inc. "If you had an iPhone that was [the size of an e-reader], you could do a lot with that." digitalize its entire library in order to put it on an e- reader, Giangrande says, the first generation of e-readers would still not fulfil the po- tential. That's because, for exam- ple, a lawyer in a courtroom who wants to call up a certain incident from a case or a para- graph from a legal document but doesn't remember the ex- act location will be out of luck because e-reader users can't conduct a comprehensive key- word search that would look for the word in each book from the device's library. "If I needed, for example, to find a specific case where the police had a motive to lie but I had to search for it, an e-reader wouldn't do me any good," Gi- angrande says. The only benefit it could have in court is as a lighter briefcase. "It would be like carrying around all the documents that I need. If the research was al- ready done, it would be great," he says. "So for now, the best way for a lawyer to do research is to use a computer," says Giangrande. "An e-reader is a one-way transaction. A laptop is in- teractive and it gives you the capabilities to search tremen- dous legal issues. You can't use [the e-reader] to browse the Internet." But despite all the draw- backs, publishing companies know this is the way of the future. "Lawyers want portability," says Jones. "They want instan- taneous information and they want it portable. The online world is wonderful for law. And the portability format is critical for our future. 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