We’ve got the technology – now give us law e-books

Some years ago, I plied this trade as an IT journalist and remember writing in breathless tones about e-ink/e-paper, and about how it could revolutionise how we look at the shifting balance between paper and computers for storage of documents and ad hoc notes. I was young(ish), daring and, frankly, a fool to futurology.

E-ink is very clever stuff – click here to go find out more about it – as it can be far more energy efficient than laptops as we know them. But I haven’t yet seen an ‘e-reader’ based on it that has made me think ‘that’s it, I can put away my trusty pens’, and I’m still not there – though iRex’s latest is a very good effort.

Sony’s reader is too small for business use and so is everything else that size, in my opinion, though I’m willing to be proved wrong. The A4 size, the clean lines and ability to annotate easily are big plusses for the 1000S, but I’d like to see a much more user-friendly interface, much faster response time when using the stylus to write on-screen, a faster screen refresh and just a faster processing unit overall.

However, I read and annotated, and compared, 10 essays by law students on it – having become a judge for the student law essay competition for the law school at Queen Mary College, University of London, sponsored by Field Fisher Waterhouse – and then discussed those essays with others, all on the device, and found it very good at this kind of thing. That sounds simple, but it was a lot easier to use than a laptop for the task. Other uses I put it to would have been better suited to book-size units, but I can definitely imagine myself using something very like this more often, especially if I was a lawyer and not a journalist.

I’d love to see law books done properly on it, with its ability to bookmark, annotate and so on – but where are the law texts in new, rights-managed PDF formats? We need legal publishers to wake up to technology like this and get the content out there – that will drive the competition in the IT market to make devices that are constantly better. And all lawyers will benefit from that.