The first wave of digital products in the CD era consisted basically of “books on screen” – existing print product repurposed with search and hypertext bells and whistles. This continued online with the advent of the web. More books on screen. Same old product, different medium. But the earth never really moved.

However, one of the biggest publishing phenomena of 2010 was yet more books on screen, now called ebooks, with Amazon’s Kindle leading the way. Same old product, different medium, but this time mobile, wireless/3G connected and of course brought to you by the dominant online bookseller who is now selling more ebooks than print books. Law publishers are now jumping on the bandwagon. I’m sure they’ll have some success and, as there are no great fixed costs, enjoy some profits. But the earth still doesn’t move for me.

In academia the earth is moving as authors seek to regain control of their work. Consider, for example, the Durham Statement on Open Access to Legal Scholarship and Open Book Publishers.

The disruptive influences of the net have forced trade publishers to innovate as their advertisers have migrated to online alternatives. Legal Week has responded by moving from free print title to a paid-for website, with law firms paying for firm-wide access. Publishers Incisive Media won the Association of Online Publishers’ Digital Publisher of the Year (Business) award in 2010: they “demonstrated a great knowledge of their audience … and have shown positive results by truly grasping digital and placing it at the core of their business.”

And what of that innovation of the late 20th century, the looseleaf service? Ruth Bird, the Bodleian Law Librarian, writing on Slaw on The Death of the Looseleaf regards as the happiest of developments the “totally new approach being taken to looseleafs online”:

At long last the publishers have stopped trying to convert static paper to static electronic flat content. They now see the information as an organic, interlinking resource that allows a serendipity of approach, hyperlinking and content are divorced from the format. And we now have to wonder how long the publishers will continue to produce the paper updates.

The looseleaf was an innovative solution first devised by the Commerce Clearing House (CCH, now part of Kluwer) addressing the problem of keeping law books sufficiently up to date, but it has been overly exploited by the publishers as a cash cow and has now had its day.

Also on Slaw, Susannah Tredwell, Library Manager at Lawson Lundell LLP in Vancouver looks at the many disadvantages of looseleafs and considers their future. Looseleafs increasingly do not provide value for money. In some looseleafs consolidated legislation and other materials that can now be found online for free make up a significant portion of the publication. Considerable staff time is taken to file updates and complicated page numbering and filing instructions result in misfiling problems which require even more staff time to resolve. (But because the end user is not the one doing the filing, this time is usually not factored in as a direct cost of the service.)

Given all these concerns, what is the future of the looseleaf service? They will increasingly migrate online, but interestingly Susannah Tredwell also suggests that some should revert to a form whence they came:

They could instead be printed as books with yearly supplements. Changing to a book format means no staff filing time, no missing pages, and (ideally) lower costs. Another solution is to remove legislative materials that can easily be obtained elsewhere.

This is a view shared by publisher Jason Wilson of Jones McClure:

Binder-based books are awful, unwieldy, lack portability, discourage innovation in typographic design, and cost more in upkeep than simply acquiring a newly bound volume.

What do you think? Are we witnessing the end of print for law books? And what are the most striking law publishing innovations for you in this rapidly changing landscape?