 I like PowerPoint because I like official pictures, you won't have a lot to read on the screen I don't know. Hi everybody. Hi John. Hi John. My name is John Mayer, I'm the executive director of Cali, the Center for Computer System Legal Instruction. I'm really glad to be here. And I'm glad you were too kind, I don't know that you've been following me for 20 years or I've been following you I guess it's just a circle. So Cali is a non-profit consortium of law schools. I get my money mostly from law schools. 211 law schools are members of Cali. I'm not even going to talk about the thing that we're most known for which is our Cali lessons and over 800 of them that were used over almost a million times this last year by law schools in the country. 32 years, something curious. You can go to the website to find out more about that. No but I want to talk about his case books. Sorry. I hope it's not going to be that boring because I think there's something exciting to this crowd and about the future of case books. Because there it is, an exciting case book and I've stripped off all the identity information so it's not to appear to favor or it's a particular publisher. But really what the future of case books is, well I've got some case book readers with me and actually I discovered that I've got five of them. So I've got my Kindle here which I can use to read books on. I've got my iPad with the best app on here being the Alice in Wonderland app. Because it's not only what you read but it also has interactive elements to it, little swinging watches and stuff like that. Just received yesterday my Edge, my Hunter-Roch Edge which I understand which actually has an Android on one side and a Kindle on the other side. I think Pepperdine is going to give these out to all their one-ells next fall. No kidding. I don't know anything about that. I've got half a dozen book readers on my phone. Of course the fifth one I've got my laptop which itself is a reader. So this is the future supposedly of case books or books. It's Kindles, it's iPads or G-pads, it's iPhones or androids, it's also laptops and it's also this. It's your iPod because if you've got a casebook or if you've got a book that's in a digital format well it's easy to turn it into something that can be listened to. At least it should be if that information is available to you for you to turn it into or if the publisher has provided it. This is also casebooks and I put that up there because it's perfect bound because it might come from a print-on-demand like a lugu which is in which you can get extremely cheap printing done. Or in some cases it might be coming from one of these machines. That's an Expresso print-on-demand machine where you're going to start seeing those in, not in Barnes and Noble I don't think they're going to do it. I think Borders though is looking at this. Where you go up you say I want to buy this book and out come something bound in five minutes or something like that. Now of course why would you want a book and paper? Well because paper is an interface. This is also a book, it's a blog right? In other words you could publish your book on WordPress with the idea that collaboration would be easier. So you read on there and you can comment and other people can comment and this is where we start to get out past the idea of just a simple book. Now we have to talk about it as a book or as a casebook because that's what law faculty and law students are familiar with but I expect that very quickly we're going to get away from that. We're going to start being very confused about what it means to be a book because it's a social artifact. It's got a built-in social group which is the class that takes it and all the classes that take it and all the people that are interested in that topic area. So the book would also be able to, if we were on a blog at least in this page from this article, portable to different devices. Because I've got a Kindle and I've bought some books but Kindle's got something called Whisper Sync and so sometimes when I forget to bring this I can grab my iPad which has got a Kindle for iPad app and I've actually sat there just because I like to do this. You know I sat there and read a few pages and then put that down and picked this up and opened the same book and it said, oh I noticed that you've moved ahead a few pages on your other thing. Do you want to sync? I'm like, I sure do. Let's do this and both of them beat back at me. That's too much of a thing. It's not that that's just funny. It's also that that's an amazingly powerful thing because as a geek I realize, there's a communication system there. There's a network underneath there. This and other information decides the mere updating of what's the next page that I'm on. There could be all sorts of things. As I highlight things, you know, you could be telling my other devices, here's the highlights that you put on that device. And as long as it's in the internet, sorry, as long as it's in the network, you know, why does it just have to tell me? Why can't it tell everybody? Why can't it have a social network around the book? What's your daily, every year or every few months? Actually, I don't even know what he's done lately, but Chicago used to have one book per, what was it, even called? Everybody reads the same book or something like that. You know, how cool would it be if we could be commenting on it while we're reading it and seeing each other's comments or something like that. All right, maybe that's stupid or crazy or not. That's compelling. But if you're all in the class together, maybe you want to share notes or maybe you want to see the notes that the professor has laid there for you, like little landmines for you to find as you progress in that book. All right? This is another book. Now, this is a comic press. It's a plug-in for wordpress. And the idea here is the book is up on the left and on the right is a collection of comments that are linked into particular paragraphs or to pages or to the entire book itself. In other words, you can sort of comment at different hierarchical levels. So if the material of the book, the date of the book, is able to be put into wordpress, then it could be put into this model where you could have an entire planet of people all commenting on the same thing. Think slash dot for books or think, you know, any of those sorts of ideas. Maybe on that big scale, it doesn't make much sense. But if you think of this down onto everybody who teaches a class has a blog that has the book in the blog and alternatively available on Kindles because some of the students are going to buy Kindles and on iPads because some of the students are going to buy iPads, not everybody's going to buy all the same thing. That's a problem, right? But if the data underneath it is in a compatible and open format, then some of these possibilities can occur. This is the sort of ultimate version of that, WikiBooks, where it's up on the web, it's open content textbooks, and anyone can edit it. Now that's really scary, right? You don't want just anyone to edit your textbook. Well, think of this as the ability that anyone can edit it, but it's a series of forks. So if at a point in time you want to teach from a book, you can freeze that copy, and you don't have to accept anybody else's additional edits or something like that. You know, some faculty think that a Wiki is something that gets changed all the time. JFK was assassinated by Martin Luther King, and so I don't want to be teaching that, you know, only the Texans want to teach those types of things. So, you know, there has to be the ability to go back to an authenticated or a, you know, a canonical copy of the book, which has to remain static for at least the three months that the class is being taught. It actually may be forever, because ten years from now you might be going to say, you know, I want to book something up that was in, that took the class, and if it was a book that I was pulling off a shelf, it was the same book, but if it was like trying to copy, you wouldn't want it to have been changed in that mid-time, in the mid-time. Now, unfortunately, this is what you are at present getting from most publishers when they say e-books. Now, it's not always a PDF. A lot of times, but it almost always is something that's going to be locked down. And I totally understand that. If it is something that was in an open-access format, well, then they would sell one copy and then a million, you know, they would just be shared out on Napster or something like that. But the rest of my talk is basically to argue that although that's a problem for publishers, it's, we got to find a solution because otherwise we're not going to be able to innovate in the ways that we want in education, and that's very important. So let's look at this. So here's our casebook, and the casebook is made up of lots of pieces. I've only pulled out a few of the cases, some analysis, problems, articles. Certainly, those cases should be free and open, you know, so that a faculty member who wanted to assemble their own casebook could. Well, three, four years ago, I was walking around and everybody and everybody trying to find a collection of cases that I could put into a database so that I could save a faculty, come build your own casebooks. It was very hard to find. No, it was impossible. I wasn't able to do it. All right? The reason why we're looking at casebooks, of course, is because it's Christopher Columbus Langdell, but the name of the project is E-Langdell because we want to update his idea that faculty would construct their own casebooks for their students. All right, so let me tell you a little about this. So here's the idea. All faculty are constructing their own books, but they're not going to construct them individually. They're going to share into a larger database. There would be this universe of faculty all contributing to the same thing. Of course, this is a digital database, and they're creating digital books because from the digital books, you can go to multiple devices or to a paper device. And what would students think? Well, students would say, cool. And the main reason, and I've said in lots of conversations that I've read every article I could find about student reactions to pilot projects and things, and the number one reason why students want electronic books is... What do you think? Wait. They want to lighten their backpacks. I mean, it always shows up on all the comments. Look, I'll pay you the money. Just make it lighter for you or something like that. Cash certainly comes up, I think, for you. The other thing is you can't lose an electronic book, because you can always get another copy of it. You can search a book. I just use Google as a verb there. I should maybe use a small key. You can highlight it because, of course, students must turn things yellow. But those highlights would be E highlights, because then maybe I could share them from my kindle up to my whisper net to other people who are on the blog reading a book through some other format. And those are searchable. And, of course, it would be cheaper. Hopefully. Yeah, I'd hope that this would result in some savings along the lines. So why would faculty want to be involved in any like this? How do I convince them? And so for that, and we passed around some of the things we're offering, Cali's offering essentially a stimulus project. We will pay faculty $500 to write a chapter. Now, I think this is a mistake. I think we messed up. Because I was already thinking ahead that what I want to do is disaggregate the book down into chunks. And I wanted to do what Linus did with Linux. I wanted to offer to the community the ability to create or to contribute to the project in small enough pieces. If you ask somebody to write a book, I'll say, sure, I'll be back in a couple of years. It takes a long time. If you ask them to write a chapter, you might get something in a month or two or something like that. And so that's where I set the price point for that. I said $500 a book. But it turns out that $500 doesn't excite people. It also doesn't solve a problem for them, really. Because my definition of a chapter is the amount of reading material that a student has to do to prepare for one course. Sorry, one class. So a 16-week course meeting three times a week for an hour, that would be 48 classes. Which means I'm willing to give people $24,000. Now, maybe not all those classes will have reading material, but actually $20,000 or something like that to write a book. So that's out there right now. This is going to mail that to all faculty in the country next week. And we've been talking about a little bit in places. I expected this flood. So I wanted to just sort of whisper it and see if it would go viral. And what's the opposite of that, right? When you whisper it, nobody listens. It's dead. No virus there. Don't worry. Okay. So that's where we're at. Of course, we're going to take that material and stick it into a commas. I'm going to give that $20,000 and I'm going to buy the copyright. Now I don't want to keep the copyright myself. I'm going to assign a creative commas to it of license so that I can turn around and give it away. But I've got to get the copyright out of the person and we're hoping that $20,000 is sufficient amount of money. I believe it to be more than most, more than what most casebook offers get now. I doubt most casebook offers $20,000 off their book. Now it's not just money and it's not just the big currency in this space is not one it's actually the reputational points you get for having it published. And the third thing is the ability to teach exactly what you want because no book ever matches exactly what you want to teach but that's the point, you write your own book. So this is about free. We would give these books away free to students but it's really about freedom to innovate in education. At least that's our goal. There's a little bit slow there. We would expect that there would be groups of faculty that might get together. Maybe they're not going to have one person collect that $20,000. They're going to get two or three of them together and form a team or a law firm or list of people on the book. So a bunch of people that have a particular way of thinking about the law or the law or something special. As a matter of fact, it's in the dog law weird areas where there is no good casebook or the area is changing too fast cyber law should be ideal international law should be good comparative law things that are like the law and the forces we can imagine all sorts of use cases where this would make some sense the Carnegie report says that legal education has to change and if legal education has to change that means the materials that are being used in legal education have to change and if we wait for the publishing cycle to catch up which is a 12 to 24 month cycle then we're going to have to basically only change well it's too late to change this year we're going to wait 12 months oh we've got this great idea a whole new curriculum we need a whole new set of books and access will be ready as soon as they're written because basically writing is publishing in this new media right? I've talked to a lot of faculty who've been going on trips to China Mary Rose Truby just got back from Baincock, got out of there alive and some of the conversations we're trying to teach others about the American law system but our books that we would use to teach our students are inadequate because of cultural problems because we don't want to teach them the same things we basically want to take the book and pare it down and add some other things to it there's just a whole different educational approach well if it's a DRM paper book they can't do that if it's an open access digital file then they can do that and they can even experiment and iterate on how to do that American Bar Association section on legal education has been pressuring or is coming up with reports soon about outcomes they would like law schools to measure whether they are succeeding in their teaching that's a good thing that law schools would measure that but obviously that would be maybe they would change the way you teach in order to improve the teaching so that would be a statistic that would be trying to make it go up and that would necessitate a change in materials we are only as nimble or capable of change or incorporating things as the materials that we use and so if those materials are DRM that's going to be a problem so I thought this was a great idea but the ghost of Elaine Dell however contacted us and sent us this video because he wasn't too happy with this so we are going to be able to get the sound of this let me try so okay we have a little bit of fun with that you get the idea so anyhow everything I just said about casebooks I hope you realize it obviously doesn't just apply to casebooks it applies to anything that might be involved in legal education as a material so code books, statute books CLE materials books written for the public for paralegal programs for criminal justice programs I noticed a billy code was mentioned half a dozen times and so I decided to look that up and find out it's a 2009 Chicago billy code for $329 I want to it is online by the way Chicago billy code is finding it online it's a little hard to find though so in conclusion let me wrap this up with the file everyone is a citizen everybody can agree with that and as we found from what Professor Stock was saying everyone therefore is a lawyer because every citizen can represent themselves in the court of law and unfortunately sometimes do that means everyone is also a law student so open access to the law well that's just the beginning of legal education for everyone so we've got to start there before we can go on to greater things so let's get it done so that that can happen John that was really a very creative and engaging understanding where you're headed but in a way you're creating or arguing for the creation of a book or an e-book that basically replicates books today it's just text where are the features that make it engaging graphics where are the pictures where's the video by the way where's the audio that opens up the experience and really transforms legal education I didn't I think of that that's a great idea absolutely once you're in a digital realm you can link videos in you can link audio you can link simulations you can link Cali lessons those are pretty neat to attach to the books and things like that I was trying to first of all keep it under a half hour but also stick to that which is relevant to what people understand today a book is because you start from where they are and you let them or they or you let the you move beyond that as people can sort of accept the change but I completely agree that that would be part of it hold out the vision you don't have to do that you can still take your text and move it into a digital environment but expand their vision the law school faculty seems in my limited experience seems terribly focused on what we did yesterday or 20 years ago or 100 years ago just fine for doing what we have to do tomorrow but if you just nudge them a little you may actually say I think I'm going to be radical here and add something else add pictures to my chapter that will move them along let me say for 20 years I've been trying to get law faculty to radically change the way they construct their curriculum and it doesn't work to excite them I know all the radical law I know all the radical law professors in the country they can fill this room or they want to do things that are even beyond they want to do really complicated stuff that's what I would call self-program very individualistic, expensive and some of them want to get grants to do some really cool amazing things what a lot of these projects didn't do was get permission to redistribute the results and so they did their one off they can use it nobody else can they didn't go through the electoral property gone so in some ways my goals are more modest so that we can bring everybody along but I would anticipate that absolutely we would want people to participate in all sorts of matters so that's a very compelling vision of the future of the casebook either with audio or giving up their copyright or the raw materials that you need are those available today or does government need to do something different in order to let you build on top of that not yet they're almost available your car ball dump last year was a huge step forward but that was only the Fed stops right I have the state supreme court cases I don't have the district court materials I have a lot of the with lii I've got us code but there's all sorts of other things as you saw in my little picture of a book there's also a lot of new articles that people want to take actually what they want to do is go out of the nexus and just grab articles out of that and drop it in I can't create a commons an article that's been grabbed out of Time Magazine or New York Times or something like that so that has to be dealt with which is to say, explain to the users in a way that either a sufficient fair use can be done or you just don't build freely available stuff with that inside of it it just becomes a link to the outside of that right your name? oh, Walt Tom from the default brand law library hey, Walt do any of you think this is a course management software like Twin and Blackboard and there's a new one coming out can you provide an opportunity to put stuff together in a way you described? there's a couple of prototype systems that are like essentially book authoring systems textbook authoring systems and there's even a couple of startups Flackworld Knowledge and the Institute of the Books got something called the Sophie Project but even that's I think you're trying to we looked at that as well but we don't have to solve the hard technical problem here no writer blog can get it to us in word format we'll take care of all of them for conversion and we'll start by just doing it manually and then as we ramp up we'll build automated systems that basically you know, you drop one format in it outcomes, you know, all the formats that you could possibly want you got a little bit of chicken and the egg thing you take a bunch of many stuff and you check out the rest of it it's a past it's absolutely a chicken and egg problem but I'm hoping they can bribe people but it's not I mean it's not a bribe I think the single biggest problem I have is I'm not west I'm not Aspen and not Lexis I don't mean the companies but I mean the imprint of their presence you know what I mean and so I shouldn't start calling this E-Lingdell press so that but the problem is the people that really care about that already have casebook contracts so it's not like they're going to extract themselves from one of those contracts and come to us we actually have to go find all the people that don't already have casebook contracts and there aren't many of them left because the big three have been signing up everybody who wants to write a casebook giving them enough money or giving them at least the reputational points for doing it I don't think there's a lot of people out there that have casebooks so I either have to overpay or pay a lot of money or I can get people to write chapters at a time the chapters I thought would work or I still think it might work because I want people to select either the class that they wish there was a better casebook chapter for or their favorite I really love teaching Rule Against Perpetuity so I'm going to write the most doing it and I'll share that with everybody and they can become the God of teaching Rule Against Perpetuities Jerry? I understand he is that the used book market is the real bane of textbook publishing and the best way to kill used books is to produce an electronic version of a new version every minute so why aren't the big three competing against each other in this domain? Is there some collusion there that they don't want to invest in these technology because they're making plenty of money with the old it would seem to be obvious that I'm sure they have a capital investment in their printing plants that they're amortizing but that was an old issue my estimate is that the market is about 100 million bucks for the communication textbook market about 20% of that's going to these are just pulling it out of my ass frankly but I have to do a lot of reading about other markets and things like that 20% of that's going to book stores 20% of that's going to the printing costs 20% of that's going to the overhead there's 40% left 35% profit 5% going to the office maybe 10% if you do an eversion of that you save the bookstore you knock out the middle man you save the printing costs so you can drop the price 40% right there so $100 book becomes a $60 book instead and it weighs a whole lot less typically though you'll see that they'll price ebooks at exactly the same or only 10% less instead of $100 it'll be $90 or something like that and it's heavily DRM they don't want to just sell one that becomes shared