For a very long time, I have been excited about the prospect of using e-ink readers to replace all of the reams and reams of paper that I use when printing out and reading cases and articles to help construct my legal briefs or editing and revising a brief. I am aware that some people can read nonstop on a computer screen, or even something as small as an iPhone, but I prefer to print out articles, cases and drafts to review in detail. I know I am not alone in that respect. But the e-ink screens are something to behold, and are entirely different than monitors or backlit screens. As explained on Wikipedia:
“The principal components of electronic ink are millions of tiny microcapsules, about the diameter of a human hair. In one incarnation, each microcapsule contains positively charged white particles and negatively charged black particles suspended in a clear fluid. When a negative electric field is applied, the white particles move to the top of the microcapsule to become visible to the reader. This makes the surface appear white at that location. At the same time, an opposite electric field pulls the black particles to the bottom of the microcapsules where they are hidden. By reversing this process, the black particles appear at the top of the capsule, which now makes the surface appear dark at that location.”
The result exactly mimics how we view print on paper. Thus, when you look at this “screen,” you are looking at the exact same thing as a piece of paper, but it can change. It really looks like alien technology. It takes far less power than a monitor (current is only needed when the pages change) and it eliminates the flickering of a monitor and the backlight. Reading on a Kindle is a vastly superior reading experience to reading on a monitor.
So when I heard that the Kindle DX was coming out, with a screen large enough to display most of the readable area of a sheet of paper and .pdf support, I immediately started imagining how easy it would be to save cases and articles as .pdfs and read them on the Kindle, without killing all of those trees and creating all of that garbage.
I’ve just received my Kindle DX in the mail, and I have to say, e-ink is every bit as magical a display as I hoped, yet the Kindle’s software falls woefully short in two respects that prevent the Kindle from serving as the revolutionary device I was hoping it would be.
First, there is no folder system. There are 4 gigs of storage on the device, so you can fit tens of thousands of cases in .pdf form on the Kindle, yet all you can do is dump them into one huge folder. It is true that you can search within that massive folder for names, but you can’t organize cases pursuant to the matter or issue for which you are storing them. I suppose you could name a file with the matter or issue first, and then do a search for that matter or issue, but that seems an overly-cumbersome process. Imagine if you had to manually name each song that you put on your iPod – “Classical-Mozart-Requiem-Dies Irae.” Folder support is a no-brainer, yet Amazon has resisted adding that simple feature, for reasons that I cannot surmise. See here, for an article suggesting that this issue was raised in 2007 for the Kindle 1, yet it still hasn’t been fixed two years later for the Kindle DX.
Second, there is no ability to markup a .pdf file. You can’t put little comments in or about a case or article. This is odd, since the Kindle does allow you to do that with .kindle format objects. So, essentially, there is no way to take notes about the case on the Kindle, which is a shame, as it requires bringing something else along to take notes on, cutting down on what would otherwise be a beautifully self-contained item. I am going to look into having the word-format files from Westlaw converted to .kindle format, so hopefully I can avoid this issue, but for now this is a real pain.
I am very excited about the future of e-ink and I think that the Kindle seems like a great device for reading Kindle books, but these two software issues really hamstring the potential for the Kindle to replace much of the printing that I currently do. I really think that is a great shame, and hopefully Amazon will act quickly to rectify these software issues. If anyone knows of any workarounds, please let me know.
