let's revisit this electronic casebook issue, shall we?

[justin gosling & abony holmes]

Remember Amazon's Kindle?  We talked about its shortcomings for the law school set here and here.  Well, the folks at Seattle PI clearly don't read The Shark, because they just ran a story about the need for an electronic casebook for law students.

Intrigued by the case against casebooks?  You're not the only one - and not just because law students are cheap.  There are also those of us who are environmentalists/minimalists with a hatred of the overuse and under-use of technology.

For the time being, we're not huge fans of electronic books for law school because the highlighting and writing in the margins of an ebook feels artificial (and many helpful law students have structured their outlines around them). Maybe Lexis and West will market an ebook of their own that is tailored for law students. Until that happens, plain vanilla electronic books may be great for reading novels, but they do not work as well for law school.

Also, I would hate to be the first person to 'fess up when called on in class that I am unable to participate because I forgot to charge my electronic book's battery.

The one thing that struck me in the Seattle PI article was the suggestion that law professors could just write their own books by selecting certain cases and building their lecture around the exact cases they want to use.

I'm not so sure this will work. Students don't read the the full text of cases; we read edited versions that cut to the heart of the matter. That is the job of the casebook editor. Editors strip out the irrelevant information from the case and add in comments and questions after the text.

If creating casebooks was just about picking the cases, I bet professors would just email out a list of citations and students could use the free printing from Lexis and West to create their own 'book.' Individualized casebooks for professors sounds like an interesting idea, but if a professor really wants to talk about a case they can print a handout and distribute it without having to make an entire casebook. 

Let's say weight is your biggest issue with casebooks.  Guess what?  You can always have your book unbound. For about $20 you can have each page cut from the binding and placed in a three ring binder. For the DIYers among you, feel free to razor out each page and three hole punch everything. The point is that you do not need to be a slave to the weight of your casebooks.

And you may want to consider doing so.  E-casebooks create more work for professors and require them to be technologically proficient, which means that they will never in a million years be implemented.

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