Nowhere is the “marginalia” so important as in legal research and the traditional law library and law office is fast becoming a thing of the past. Larger screens are coming and the prices will continue to drop, just like my I-pod’s and laptops. It is already starting to happen with e-readers. Early adopters are going to pay more, that is all.

The driving force behind the change isn’t going to be in the library, but in the marketplace. When I can have every file in my office and all the applicable research on a particular case instantaneously available to every single employee, I have a huge competitive advantage to my paper bound rivals, so big that I’ll be able to pay extra for a Han Lin (which I’m thinking strongly about).

I prefer the print screen technology of the e-reader’s over the laptop and a tablet is easier to use in Court than a laptop.

As far as proprietary software dictating the market, books and publishing are headed down the same road, albeit a little slower, that music has traversed. An open standard, ala .mp3, will be adopted and utilized, probably forced by either Google’s book project or Adobe’s market prevalence.

Also, I write, clip, annotate and highlight on both my Kindle and my .pdf files — every day and my marginalia is digital and can actually be hyperlinked to other marginalia.

I love books. I own over 3000, maybe even more, but information is much more manageable and accessible in digital format.

My marginalia is limited to the one book it is in, but it’s in a format that is persistent, readable by anyone who possesses that book and can be added with any pen, pencil or other writing implement.

Proprietary technologies cannot replace a ‘Makeable’ system like a book. Until ebooks can match that, they won’t end the book.

I can see e-books replacing the pulp novel now.

I can see e-books replacing reference books once a cross-platform standard is adopted.

I can’t see an ebook replacing study books where marginalia is important.

I also run a mostly paperless law office, so I practically live in .pdf files, which if created properly are word searchable, which I constantly use to navigate the .pdf files as if they are scrolls. Research is all digital now, a complete shift from twenty years ago.

I love books — in all their forms, whether it be digital or paper. I disagree with your last statement a little bit though — the digital book, regardless of its form is far superior for search, indexing, research, copying, storage (I carry the complete works of Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Dickens, Dostoyevsky and 150 other books with me to the office every day in something smaller and thinner than most trade paperbacks), redundancy (multiple copies) and alternative printing styles.

The paper book is more about art, texture and history now, rather than any previous advantage it might have had in conveying information to the masses. The book is devolving into coffee table books. Right now, the only books I buy are books that are graphically impressive because digitization of books hasn’t and probably won’t eliminate that genre of books. Yet as search capabilities improve, the difference between scroll and codex is going to disappear completely in relation to books containing mostly text and even some graphics and our paper books are going to seem as useful and relevant as the hand printed texts as those of monks in the middle ages seem to us now.

Give it a try(it’s a beta!) and let us know how it works for you.

Computers are great, but it’s people who get the job done.