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.

Working with iBooks Author

I have been working with Apple's iBooks Author software more today, and can report that it is very much like Pages for the Mac, with interactive "widgets" built in to add interactivity and an output capability directly to iBooks. It also has a "Preview" feature so you can see what it looks like on your iPad before you publish the book to the iBookstore.

As I was working with the program, I prepared a mindmap showing the features I think one would want in an interactive textbook for legal education, and also noting which of those features iBooks Author has already baked in. Here is the diagram (the checkboxes indicate which features Apple has already included):

The quiz functionality is very basic, and would not work well for legal materials.  If you are going to quiz law students on legal information, the provided answers in the multiple choice questions need to be longer than is allowed in the software, but more importantly, they need to provide detailed answers for students to review after they have taken the quiz.  Also, it should be noted that there is no "email results to teacher" option, or any capture of how the student did on the quiz. This functionality has been part of law school courseware sites for many years, and so many will want to have it (in some form). The thinking seems to be (so far with this 1.0 version of the software) that these questions are merely for review.  Which is fine, but a law text would need more room for the questions and more information provided in the answer and review part of the quiz. Merely knowing you got the question "right" does not provide enough instruction.

Also, a glaring omission is social networking. One of the most important technology developments in the last several years has been the rise of social networking.  Social reading is still catching on, but the Kindle has had this feature for over a year.  (If you are reading something on your Kindle and want to share a passage with  your Twitter following, it's a matter of a few clicks). This kind of functionalility could be very powerful for law students, but it is not available in the 1.0 version of the iBooks Author software.

A concern is that links into webcourse systems may be somewhat problematic.  Embedding links in an iBook out to a website is simple: it opens the link in Safari on the iPad.  But embedding links that might require a logon step (like to a University Blackboard or other courseware system) does not seem to work very well.

A more sophistocated software end-to-end solution can be found at Inkling, and in the Inkling iPad App, but that software is not generally available to the public, much less free.  Inkling is working with publishers to help them convert their books over to iBooks, and they do have social capability built in to their software, as well as many of the same (or similar) interactive features the iBooks Author software does.  

Inkling has published a traditional law school textbook with Aspen Publishers (Wolters Kluwer): Wills, Trusts, and Estates.  It is, frankly, a very poor example of what I think we want to do in making a law school text into an iBook format for the iPad.  I downloaded the first chapter into the Inkling software on the iPad, and it essentially the same as the print - that is, the old style "dinosaur" formatted law textbook.  There are internal links to other parts of the text. The demo page for the book seemed to indicate that there were links for cases out somewhere, but those are not visible or usuable in the Chapter I reviewed. I also did not see any links to rules or much of any additional, contextual information.  Oh, there was a picture of Sandra Day O'Connor embedded in one of her opinons while she served on the U.S. Supreme Court.  Big whoop. And here is the most disappointing part: the Inking eBook version of the Wills & Trusts book is the same price as the print version: $159. Although you can purchase chapters separately (for $22 each).

It is interesting to read the reaction of Inkling's CEO to the Apple eTextbook announcement on Thursday. Here is a particularly thoughtful quote from his blog post:

Although Apple introduced some beautiful content, there are miles to go before this industry scales itself around building products that are “born” digital. To do so will take sophisticated tools and a cross-platform, open infrastructure that has yet to materialize. 

He put his finger on a big issue right there - the textbook publishing industry is going to have to re-scale itself around a different kind of publishing than they are used to, and that they know. "Born digital" is a different realm, and being a traditional editor at a traditional publishing house is a job that is going away (however slowly) or changing significantly (over time).

In the meantime, Apple has made a tool available to enterprising authors to publish their own work, and experiment with their own interactive elements. How these will be incorporated into law textbooks remains to be seen, but the iBooks Author tool makes a lot possible.

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.