Law School 2.0

Article on eTextbooks in Legal Technology News

 

In the Legal Technology News this week Evan Koblentz published an article entitled: Apple, Publishers, Open-Source Dictate Law School Textbook Evolution.  It is a helpful article about the possibilities for future law school textbooks.  It quotes me, as well as John Mayer from CALI.  

As Evan suggests, no one really knows what the future will bring, or the timing of it.  But it does seem that the era of the traditional law school textbook is on the wane.

As I have said before (in the LS2 book and elsewhere), we often think of new technologies as replacing, rather than as being additive.  It makes for good media - "the sky is falling," and all that - but more often, new technologies are additive. We still have records and CDs after all.  We will still have books - a far more useful technology than either records or CDs - for a long, long time.  

The interesting dynamic in the law school textbook market is found in the combination of forces.  We know we need to teach in a different way - not, by and large, the casebook-bound way.  So we need new teaching materials at the same time as the technology is maturing to support the delivery of learning material in new and more effective ways.  It is in the combination of these forces that interesting things will happen.  Will the answer be found in hybrid books (print and online), at least for some time?  Will it be found in eBooks? Will it be found in interactive iBooks? Inquiring minds want to know.

But most likely it will be a combination of these, for different learning goals, and used in different ways for different courses, over a long period of time.  The market is not disappearing only to replaced with a phoenix rising from the sand. The market is fracturing.  Which, of course, presents opportunities for all of us.  Publishers, Authors, and Teachers.

eTextbook Announcement from Apple today

About a year ago I gave a presentation in which I said: “Somewhere in a warehouse in Brooklyn, there’s a group of guys and gals living on Jolt cola and cold pizza creating a publishing platform direct to the iPad.  It will allow authors to create interactive textbooks, publish directly to the iBookstore, and to take a 70% royalty, not 15 or 20.”  I did not know any of this to be true.  But I had a hunch; it just seemed inevitable.

A few months later, it turned out my guess was right – PushPop Press (yes, I even had the “based in Brooklyn” part right) announced their first interactive book, Al Gore’s Our Choice.  The Vice President’s latest book on the environment – for the iPad only - provides an immersive reading experience, with photos that can be moved and enlarged, views of data on graphs that can be adjusted by the reader, and embedded video and voice overs.  It is a stunning book, and I recommend it – for the content, but also for the delivery.  What was even more significant to me was that PushPop announced at the same time that they were about to make available the software that would let authors create such books, and publish them to the iPad. That was significant to me because I have long argued that we need better and more interactive textbooks for legal education. It is what I said three years ago in the Law School 2.0 book, and why I have been working on the Skills & Values Series with Lexis for the last two years. The reality is that if we are going to teach law in a different way - a 2.0 way - we need different teaching materials.  The traditional casebook just will not work.  This question is also deeply intertwined with the Educating Tomorrow's Lawyers project, about which you can learn more here.

And then this summer, the stunning and disappointing news that PushPop Press had been sold to Facebook before they could release this software, and they were no longer going to deliver the product others could use, or any other eBook.  At the time, that announcement was both an inexplicable setback and a disappointment.

This morning at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, Apple made an announcement that might explain why PushPop decided to fold its tent.  Apple announced today a new software product called iBook Author, which allows authors to create interactive books for the iPad and sell them direct to customers through the iBookstore.  And, just like apps in the iTunes store, authors get to keep a 70% royalty. Oh, and Apple has made the iBook Author software available for free (although it runs only on the Mac).

From my point of view, this is a significant development.  When the iPad came out, I posted here about that development, which was a very important one in the journey towards the interactive eTextbook future.  But in the last two years there has not been much to talk about – publishers have been figuring out what to do with it, and authors have been unsure whether to commit to the platform. The iPad gave us the platform, and while it has taken two years Apple has now sold more than 50 Million of them.  Not surprisingly, they are becoming more common in law schools.  In the last year, I have seen them appear in my classes, and in faculty meetings too.

But there is another critical step needed. Until now the reason to use an iPad to contain and use your law school textbook has been essentially nil because publishing the kind interactive textbooks that I have long envisioned for law school was difficult and expensive and so we just have not seen them yet.  But with Apple's launch of the iBook Author software, professors who want to use their own teaching materials (sometimes called a “course pack”) and to make them available on the iPad can do this with relative ease. For more extensive law books, professors who have current publishing contracts will want to speak with their publisher about whether they could get some help publishing their book in this format, and to begin to think about what interactive elements would make their book more engaging and useful for their students.

It is probably not entirely a coincidence that West – an information giant in the legal field – has just announced that they are divesting their Law School Publishing Division.  Just selling it off. Apparently, they no longer want to be in the business of producing what I have called "dinosaur" textbooks for legal education. Click here to read their letter to authors about this. 

Of course, for Apple, their move is about selling more iPads.  There is much discussion today in the blogosphere about how the EULA in the software requires an author who uses it to publish an iBook – and wants to charge for it - can only post the book for sale there.  That is, the author cannot separately make the iBook they produce with the Apple software available for a download from their own website (unless they make it free).  Although this is a new and fairly brazen requirement for the output of software (can you imagine such a requirement for everything you've written in Microsoft Word?) this seems a reasonable restriction to me.  Apple is offering the tool and the platform – the “end-to-end” solution - that has been elusive so far in this space.  Perhaps a reasonable analogy is that when you want a booth at a conference to gain exposure to your target audience, you have to pay for the booth, and it's only useful there.

But over time, we will probably see more open solutions - ones that work on the PC too - and that allow authors to publish eBooks simultaneously to the iBookstore for download to the iPad and to Amazon for download to the Kindle Fire.

In the meantime, this is a significant step for education - and thus for legal education too. I highly recommend that you view the demonstration video on Apple’s site - it explains in beautiful Apple style what they have done (complete with compelling cello music in the background).  If you would like more information about Apple's announcement from a more objective source than Apple, you might want to read this article at Wired.  Some other interesting views of Apple's announcement can be found here, here, and here.

I welcome your thoughts about this development - please post them in the Comments.

 

eBooks with Scroll Motion

This video of Josh Koppel, CEO of Scroll Motion, shows how their technology is being used to present Hearst magazines (including Oprah) on the iPad.  It also shows their technology in a Houghton Mifflin math textbook, which looks particularly interesting to me.

I have long thought that this sort of technology can be and should be applied to law school textbooks.  (In fact, I predicted it three years ago in Law School 2.0). Not all of law textbooks, but many of them.  They could be so much more engaging and instructive.  No, not all law students have iPads.  But three print law school textbooks cost the same as an iPad, and those mostly contain cases that have been available free online for almost a decade, and at the end of the semester you can't play Angry Birds on them.  

At the Future Ed 3 Conference at New York Law School last April, I gave a talk within which I said something that was interrupted by applause by the nearly 100 attendees.  (That's never happened before, by the way). I said: "The classic law school textbook is a dinosaur waiting to die."  The interesting question is: what will it be replaced with?  The Skills & Values Series of hybrid (print and online) law school textbooks - described elsewhere on this blog - is as far as I have gotten in answering this question, and they are pretty cool. But this sort of technology - and similar like Inkling and Kno - has the potential to make truly engaging, useful, and more effective books for law school teaching.

Here is the clip: 

 

Apple Announcement

The long rumored Apple event is now confirmed. On January 27 at 10 a.m. PST, Apple will be unveiling its "latest creation." It is not publicly known for sure what will be revealed on the 27th, but it is widely believed to be a table device with a virtual keyboard and a new multi-touch interface. If you believe the rumors, think of it as a large (10" or so) iPhone.

Although likely a capable web-browser and gaming machine, for me the most important aspect of this rumored tablet will be its capabilities as an eReader device. Finally, it looks like we will have a multi-use device that can also serve as a capable eReader, with color and embedded video. In other words, we may finally have not only a new eReader device, but a platform to which one can publish multi-media books. This has significant implications for law textbooks - and particularly the Skills & Values series, which seeks to integrate print and online capabilities. This device might just merge those two in the same "book." (Disclosure: I am a series editor of the S&V series, and am currently working on the Discovery book in that series).