Publishing
The future of law publishing (reprise)
Kevin O’Keefe is a tireless promoter of the benefits of blogging for lawyers. I may disagree with him on many points but I’m with him all the way with the underlying proposition that blogs (for lawyers) are the best thing since, well, sliced bread. His recent post Bloggers to be driving force in legal web […]
Data protection intrigue
I was intrigued to see that DLA Piper has just published Data Protection Laws of the World. This 274-page PDF handbook “offers a high-level snapshot of national data protection laws as they currently stand in 58 jurisdictions across the world. It provides a quick overview of the aspects of data protection law that are often […]
ICLR online – who’s putting it through its paces?
I’m wondering who’s using ICLR online and how they’re getting on? The service launched 18 October to a list of over 350 delegates that was “fairly select and exclusive due to the nature of our Council”. Before the event no doubt there was lots of direct mail and email promotion by ICLR to its customer […]
Innovations in law publishing and the death of (some) print
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 […]
Are (law) ebooks the future?
You can’t have missed the fact that Amazon’s fastest selling product last year was its Kindle ebook reader. Even I bought one. And during the year his Godliness Steve Jobs gave us the iPad tablet. Though the iPad is more than an a e-reader, as such it is of course much more book-like than an […]
Footnotes suck
When I started out in law publishing I joined a young company with a modern approach. A key point in our house style, which I was instrumental in formulating, was “We eschew [nice word that] the use of footnotes.” Why? They don’t help the writer who has to partition their thoughts into mains and asides […]
A tale of two professions
Legal Research Plus comments on an article about John West [founder of West Publishing] and other non lawyers who have revolutionized legal research. Apparently West called for neutral citations way back in 1908. The author of the article, Prof Robert Jarvis, asks: how a man who did not go to college, and was untrained in […]
Wexisberg – is three a crowd?
Across the pond Bloomberg has had the effrontery brazenly to challenge the Wexis duopoly with Bloomberg Law. Bob Ambrogi has written an extended review of Bloomberg Law on Law.com. He reports that to bring itself up to competitive speed, Bloomberg hired an army of some 500 lawyers and has them nose to the grindstone writing […]
Why pretty print is bad for the web
Here’s another of my beefs: publishing PDF on the web is lazy, bad practice. PDF – portable document format – what does that mean? It means, here’s what you want to print … in a file. It’s a portable print format; not a native web document format and not an open document format. It looks […]
eLawtric Books anyone?
Jason Wilson explores the pros and cons of what he dubs “eLawtric Books“. In a series of posts he (for the most part) counters Eugene Volokh’s thoughts on the future of electronic books and the law. His view, with which I agree, is that ebooks a la Kindle et al are not the future of […]
Are we (still) in thrall to BigLaw?
Jordan Furlong bemoans (on Slaw and Law21) the fact that the legal media focus on BigLaw, because BigLaw makes a lot of money, so they’re attractive both as subscribers and as advertising targets. It’s not good for smaller practices, which count the majority of all lawyers among their ranks, that they don’t get to hear […]
Never mind the content … (2)
Paul Graham, an essayist and successful entrepreneur, pens a very interesting piece on Post-Medium Publishing which is worth reading in full (hat tip John Naughton). He opens: consumers never really were paying for content, and publishers weren’t really selling it either. If the content was what they were selling, why has the price of books […]
Never mind the content, feel the packaging
So, Rupert Murdoch has declared that News International sites will all start charging for content by next summer. What he actually said was he was satisfied that News International could produce “significant revenues from the sale of digital delivery of newspaper content”, that “we intend to charge for all our news websites” and “make our […]
Blowing it
Plenty to ponder about the future not just of the established news industry but also of other old media players in this post from Jeff Jarvis and the numerous comments: You’ve had all that time to reinvent your products, services, and organizations for this new world, to take advantage of new opportunities and efficiencies, to […]
Not a problem
Clay Shirky eloquently states the problem facing the newspaper industry: People committed to saving newspapers [are] demanding to know “If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” To which the answer is: Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke. […]
