Review: the iRex 1000S digital reader
Yes, I know, you’ve heard it all before. One day soon, a day hiding perversely just out of sight, law firms will realise that shuffling bits of dead tree around is a pretty dumb way of organising their information. They will go paperless. You don’t believe this.
Like all technological steps forward, digital documents have as much a place in our lives as we are willing to give them, and it is only the ‘platform’ that is the true problem. Most of the rest is politics and resistance.
Why law firms aren’t trying to push staff into using digital versions of documents isn’t just down to whether there’s a good read/write device to use – you have to have security of documents, you have to be able to share them easily, they have to be portable, available, auditable and easy to use. But Adobe and other e-document companies have solved all these problems to varying degrees. All that is actually holding us back from going almost paperless in our firms and in court is platform, and the will to do it.
So I watch the development of e-readers – devices specifically for reading and marking up electronic documents – carefully, because one day soon some will get made that will successfully and easily allow us to: store loads of papers on one slim device; mark up and annotate; and read our newspapers, magazines and newsfeeds, all fed wirelessly. These devices won’t be laptops – they’ll perform a much narrower range of tasks, but perform them much better. I am convinced this will happen; it’s just a matter of time. The question is simple – if you could wipe out 80% of the paper in your life and put it all in a device that you liked, and found easy to use, why wouldn’t you do it?
E-ink is very clever stuff because 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. One downside present in all e-readers so far is an inherent drawback within e-ink – it’s grey, not white, so the contrast just isn’t as good as you’d like.
Sony’s reader (not pictured here), at around A5 size, is too small for business use and so is everything else that size, in my opinion, though I’m willing to be proved wrong. Its A4 size, clean lines and ability to annotate easily are big plusses for the iRex, but I’d like to see a much more user-friendly interface, much faster response time when using the stylus to write onscreen, a faster screen refresh and faster processing overall.
However, I read, 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. This sounds simple, but the iRex was a lot easier to use than a laptop for the task. Other uses I put it to would have been better suited to paperback-size units, but I can definitely imagine myself using something like this, especially if I was a lawyer, more often.
What I think would really change the landscape and pull lawyers into a more paperless future isn’t more scanners in the office. I’d love to see law books done properly on PDF on something like the iRex, with its ability to bookmark, annotate and so on – but where are the law texts in new, rights-managed, properly flowing 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.
