The Wall Street Journal reported today on several higher education initiatives designed to test student reaction to e-textbooks. At Northwest Missouri State University, 200 students received the Sony Reader loaded with course texts. Although some students stuck with the Reader, dozens traded it in for old-fashioned print texts, finding the devices "awkward" and "inconvenient." University officials quoted in the story said that "students didn’t like that they couldn’t flip through random pages, take notes in the margins or highlight text." (Sony's latest version of the Reader now has note-taking and highlighting features.)
Will law schools join in the digital text experiment? The Zief librarians have heard of several publishers that are moving in the direction of digital texts, including the Practising Law Institute, which is now releasing Kindle editions of some of its titles. But PLI concentrates on practicing attorneys, not the academic market. West has released at least one digital casebook and plans to release more in the near future. Some law professors aren't waiting around for the publishers to develop these products. They're seizing the initiative and creating their own digital casebooks and statutory supplements. At least one expert predicts in this article that e-textbooks will be the norm in law schools in "3-5 years." One thing is certain - law students are highlighting and note-taking maniacs, and producers of digital texts and readers must incorporate these tools into their products if they want them to be attractive to the law student market.
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