Getting Impatient

Just a thought: I'm beginning to get frustrated with publishers, now. They seem to be stuck in a rut. All they seem capable of is getting us the same old thing in new packages. You know, "books on database." When it gets down to it, for the most part most publishers are selling us the same thing twice. Once in print and once electronically. And if we all dump the print in favor of the electronic format, all we've really done is accelerate the process of information distribution, electronic newsletters, search engines, hypertext links, etc. Fine. But that isn't what the whole technological revolution is all about. The difficult task of legal research (of lawyers) is making sense of all the information.

There are tools that publishers can use to facilitate that process. Targeted data mining, subject tagging and indexing, doing marvelous things by making secondary sources the center of search engines, and all sorts of things that we can't even imagine yet. But where are they? Lord knows we've got the computing power! Use it for crying out loud!

Publishers should be selling us something new. Something useful. And, in an ideal world, would be free....

This was sent from my iPhone, so I'm sure it's riddled with errors. Please forgive me. I will sit down later with my computer and clean it up.


Richard Leiter