Legal News

When the Kindle Hits the Ivory Tower, How Will the Academy React?

By Ashby Jones

On the topic of digitizing books, University of Illinois law professor Larry Ribstein weighs in this morning on his Ideoblog about the threat the paper-to-pixels move in publishing poses to law professors.

Ribstein’s post was prompted by a separate post by UCLA’s Stephen Bainbridge, who recently wrote on the topic of Amazon’s eBook reader, the Kindle. Wrote Bainbridge:

[T]he used book market takes a huge chunk out of my annual royalties. The drop off from the first year of a new edition to the second can be as high as 30%, for example. I can’t imagine the hit my royalties would take if e-books of my texts were available without strong [digital rights management]. But it seems safe to assume that anything remotely resembling an e-book Napster would be a disaster from my perspective. My assumption is that it would make the hit we currently take from the used book market look like chicken feed. The enormous amount of time and effort put into writing and updating the books simply would no longer be worth it. . . . Contra Lessig, I worry that Kindle and its forthcoming ilk don’t give copyright holders enough control.

In response, Ribstein draws an analogy to the music business. To his surprise, when the digital era hit, prices for music fell, but the cost of attending many live concert performances went up. Why was this? Ribstein muses:

Maybe because the shows are getting better because they’re more important to artists' careers. So that may be why the troubadour is returning. Will we see this effect in other areas — a resurgence of live theatre? The big-time lecture tour, like the ones Dickens and Wilde used to do? I sure hope it doesn’t mean that everybody in the intellectual property business will suddenly have to work for a living.

Well, maybe we’re all rock stars now. I can’t wait to see Prof [Bainbridge] in a sequined vest.

Ribstein’s post made us laugh, but it also raised a handful of interesting questions in our minds: to what degree do law professors rely on casebook royalties to buttress their salaries? And to what degree will they fight for strong copyright protection once their casebooks find their way to Kindles, eReaders and the like? Following from this, to what degree will any sort of laissez-faire academic attitudes about DRM change within the legal ivory tower if and when professors start feeling a hit to the pocketbook? It’ll be interesting to see how it all unfolds.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on July 24, 2009 (boomark / email).