Kindle for law students
by scotslawstudent
I got a Kindle for my birthday this year and I think it’s a great thing. The interesting thing is that I think it’s deeply flawed in a few ways (the annotation features and the keyboard for two) but regardless think it’s amazing.
In particular the current model begins to puts a dent into the logic of using photocopiers. I’m a huge fan of photocopying, of course, because it’s the best thing ever and all law students love doing it.
Interestingly, it’s suggested that students are actually doing more reading than they used to because of the increased use of computer resources. There isn’t the same need for students to spend time buried in the stacks fighting over the one copy of a set text and that leaves more time for them to read the set text. Whether or not students pouring over endless piles of PDFs is a good thing is, of course, something humans are not allowed to agree on.
2011 EWHC 1578 (Admin) is R v Hookway
The photocopy metric
I’ve written about paperless law students before and, although it’s getting better, the economics still don’t quite stack up. My university does 5p/sheet photocopying and this is relatively high as photocopying costs go. Nonetheless, at £111 for a Wifi-only Kindle you break even when you read the equivalent of 2220 A4 pages on your Kindle and I’m aware that’s a big number. I’m not sure exactly how many pages I read at uni but my impression is you are going to manage that at some point during your degree (it’s not all that many 20-30 page cases and journal articles spread over the years). That said four and a half reams is a big chunk of pages and it won’t pay for itself quickly compared to a photocopier. You’re still paying a fair bit for convenience.
You can’t completely replace photocopying with a Kindle because you may still need it for copying books and paper only periodicals as well as printing out submissions, bundles and so on but you’ll not need to spend quite so long printing out case reports and journal articles and it’s easier to read a kindle on the bus than a thick stack of A4. Bear in mind that, as you go through your degree, you start reading fewer and fewer textbooks and more and more journal articles so it becomes increasingly handy. In terms of reading it should be perfectly fine for law students. I can understand that certain disciplines are unsuited to a device which is designed to display text but law is not one of them.
The "flip through" problem continues for ebook readers and I still don’t see any practical way to fix it. I don’t think this is such a concern for journal articles as it is for textbooks. I think that you consume journal articles from beginning to end and flipping to the middle of an article doesn’t make sense in the same way that flipping to the middle of a textbook does.
Display
The Kindle’s stand out feature is its display. E-ink is effectively an electromagnetic printer which applies and removes ink onto a surface on demand. The screen is incredibly paper like and I’ve experienced no eye strain (to be fair I don’t really get eye strain looking at a backlit display either) when using it. It’s like using paper which changes which you press a button.
The black and white flicker effect when you change pages is a bit annoying but it lasts for a fraction of a second and it’s the very definition of a first world problem. The display works extremely well (perhaps better) in strong light which means that it can be used by windows or outside but there is a slight sheen on the display which can cause some reflections. As someone who has sat inside on nice days reading case reports on my laptop that is worth the price of admission alone.
Annotation
The markup features on the Kindle are just alright. They’re not brilliant by any stretch of the imagination. The lack of a touch interface means that highlighting is fiddly and there doesn’t seem to be a way to get your highlighted documents onto your computer. You can copy your highlighted text over a USB cable but you can’t display highlighted case reports on your computer. I prefer to write notes rather than highlight the text so this wasn’t a huge concern for me but depending on your style it could be substantial. I think Amazon should really make it easier to use your annotated "personal documents" (ie. documents on your Kindle not purchased from Amazon) with the desktop software.
Keyboard
The keyboard on the Kindle is frankly not designed to be used. It’s a waste of space in its current form. The only things on the Kindle that require typing are 1) the browser and 2) notes but the keyboard really hamstrings them. Amazon has to fix that.
iPad
There are some rather more substantial PDF based tools available on, for example, the iPad (which really blows the photocopy metric out of the water: the break even point on a 16GB iPad is 7980 pages) which I’m not going to recommend for a student. I think a student has much more pressing financial concerns than owning two computers, especially if one is just there to annotate PDFs. If you can afford it and you want one you should go ahead. My view on the iPad is that it’s a good device but it’s pretty expensive for a student.
Calibre
My main use of the Kindle in practice, mostly due to getting it in the latter part of my honours year, has been newspapers. There is a fantastic program called Calibre which lets you email the paper to your kindle every day and I find that convenient for the bus in the mornings as well as being cheaper than buying a paper.
Calibre also handles converting most document types into a format that the Kindle can understand (and Amazon can also directly convert documents themselves). The device itself has a relatively narrow range of supported formats but conversion programs exist to allow a wide range of documents to work.
I think all Kindle owners should install Calibre pretty much as a matter of course because it is such a useful piece of software.
Conclusion
As you can see I think the Kindle is a flawed device in many ways but it does something, for a very reasonable price, which is pretty hard to complain about. The e-ink display is fantastic and really makes the device, with the battery life and easy over-the-air sync being why you should it love it.
The Kindle won’t be your one-thing-to-get-you-through-law-school computing device but there is no such thing anyway. If you’re looking for a good, reasonably priced device for reading case reports in the park or on the bus I think you have to consider the Kindle.
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Great post – and I particularly liked the statement, “I’m a huge fan of photocopying, of course, because it’s the best thing ever and all law students love doing it.”
Maybe it is for some; I think I photocopied about 3 times during my law degree (though I did scan stuff in at home more regularly).
I’ve been very late to the party in terms of mobile devices and only got my first smartphone late last year. I’ve seriously considered a Kindle 3g and an iPad 2 (particularly now I’m a full-on commuter) but I don’t quite see enough in either of these products to make me definitely want to buy them. I’ve been saying I’d get myself a netbook for 2 or 3 years now and I think I’ve thoroughly missed the boat on that one. Re. the kindle, I agree the standout feature is definitely the screen but other limitations all dissuaded me to buy one. Plus, I’ve gotten completely out of the ‘recreational reading’ thing for the last few years now and, despite some serious attempts to get back into it, I just can’t.
So, I’m sticking with my phone for now, though will re-consider when the next gen iPad comes out
The trick to enjoying photocopying is doggedly hanging onto the childlike love of getting to play with large machines
. To be honest quite a lot of my photocopying was self inflicted – law clinic, mooting bundles, that sort of thing because I’d normally just get a PDF off Westlaw and read it on my laptop. My problem with scanning at home was I didn’t have an ADF and refused to scan at a sensible resolution so it always took ages.
The thing that’s stopped me getting a netbook is that I already have a laptop which does basically the same thing and the advantages of the slightly more lightweight device don’t outweigh having to buy it and I think the same goes with e-readers and tablets. The Kindle is pretty well priced but it’s is really limited in what it does and if you go beyond the things it does really well it’ll bug you so you have to be careful before buying a Kindle that it’s even suitable for you. I think the iPad is a bit too expensive to be a book reader. Frankly, I feel it’s into the “I don’t want to flash this on the bus” price range and that’s not good for how much I’ll use it.
I was doing some background googling for this post and discovered that Justice Kagan (of United States Supreme Court fame) is a Kindle user and Justice Scalia is an iPad user. I can totally see the use of a mobile document reading device for them but that’s pretty niche.