Law publishing

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?

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 law, was able to devise methods that revolutionized legal research and, by extension, legal practice. Why was no judge or lawyer able to see what he saw? Perhaps the answer is that they were not looking, or perhaps it took an outsider to see what the cognoscenti could not.

I think the short answer is that lawyers are (we hope and expect) good at lawyering not at developing publishing systems.

The full 23-page article by prof Jarvis is availablein PDF.

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 headnotes, tagging cases and readying a law digest.

500 lawyers x $ whatever = a lot of $$ invested in editorial, let alone tech, marketing and blah blah.

There’s no doubt that quality editorial (authored law) is what differentiates the established law publishers from most freeloading wannabees, but I wonder if $$ will be enough?

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 or music or movies always depended mostly on the format? Why didn’t better content cost more?

We didn’t (don’t) buy fiction and non-fiction, we bought books; not news, but newspapers; not music and movies, but encased CDs and DVDs. Publishers play to our desire for better packaging and/or our perception that bigger and better packaged products are more valuable: hardcovers command a premium over paperbacks; DVD cases are larger than CD jewel cases. It’s easy to see this working in the mass market. But in business and professional markets, where there is a compelling need (rather than desire) for the content and/or a relative scarcity of content creators and publishers, the content:packaging value ratio increases.

So it is with law books. Lawyers need up-to-date reference texts; the market is small and there were hitherto relatively few authors willing to put the time in to creating content and relatively few publishers willing to invest in its dissemination. So law books have always been expensive – several times more than equivalently-packaged consumer books.

Enter the internet which has enlarged the market, enabled more authors and more publishers and driven the marginal cost of producing copies to near zero. What price content now? Has the emperor been denuded of his clothes?

The physical packaging has gone, but there is still a relative scarcity of good authors and good publishers – just because anyone can do it, does not mean that anyone can do it well. There is value in the packaging, but that packaging is about how content is edited, combined, organised and presented. Despite the physical apparel, that is what publishing has always been about.

Those are my thoughts. As to what forms these new packages will take, Paul concludes:

The reason I’ve been writing about existing forms is that I don’t know what new forms will appear. But though I can’t predict specific winners, I can offer a recipe for recognizing them. When you see something that’s taking advantage of new technology to give people something they want that they couldn’t have before, you’re probably looking at a winner. And when you see something that’s merely reacting to new technology in an attempt to preserve some existing source of revenue, you’re probably looking at a loser.

PS. More on content/packaging from Scott Karp.

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.

With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves – the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public – has stopped being a problem.

With advertising revenues nosediving, proprietors are culling journalists to maintain profit margins but with no clear idea of how to make the web pay.

The need to find new business models that work in the digital age may be less urgent in other publishing sectors, but it is no less important. Many of the services offered by the incumbent law publishers were designed to meet needs that the web (of increasingly open and inter-connected information) is now better able to serve in new ways, and they have consequently been experiencing a steady decline in subscriptions as users opt for alternative, more appropriate, lower cost or free services.

Responses assume the old model still has relevance; some are misguided or even suicidal: pricing up existing services, developing more walled gardens, establishing me-too communities and diversifying away from their core competencies. For how much longer can they continue to ramp up prices to maintain profits? How long before free access not just to primary law sources and news, but also to quality guidance and commentary, seriously undermine the viability of their business? How long before they acknowledge that the 20th century law publishing model is broken?

They are putting on a brave face in the face of the storm, still reporting profits and professing confidence in their products. One wouldn’t expect otherwise. The problem is, as Shirky says, that publishing is no longer a problem. We are all publishers now.