Which one for law school?

[richman]

Originally Posted by hermance

Sorry, I couldn't resist. But this is a really silly argument. One can make similar claims about almost any discipline--say, history or psychology or on and on. And of course, law school and intensely complicated legal codes existed long before laptops.

Look, I'm not saying that law students don't need to take lots of notes; virtually all post-graduate programs require intensive notetaking in class. I'm just saying that different professors have different pedagogical perspectives. Some want students taking lots of notes, but others would rather have students be active participants at times. It's generally the professors in the latter category who get frustrated by incessant laptop use, and those professors can be in any discipline. Since there was so much eyerolling about professors' exasperation about laptops, I just wanted to give a different perspective on the issue.

I guess everybody got to share about pro's and con's of laptops/netbooks/pctablets in classroom. It's OLD school. Just like we have computers in elementary school today , it's just a fact of life. And law school and most other PRO fields have gone that way, we understand touchy-feel-ie stuff and all the rest and student/teacher re-pore. My medical teachers had chalk and board and from beginning of class to end , just talked facts and anything was fair game on test. Let's just stop the classroom stuff and focus on ereader for law texts, best way to scan docs/programs and hints for making them useful for studying. We all learn differently, some are visual, auditory, and some are the other couple of ways, whatever works is what works. Stop telling us YOUR WAY is the BEST way, just it is way that works for you. My philosophy , english teacher, history teacher, and other touchie-feel-ie subjects are about shifting consciousness. A changed consciousness changes everything. There are faster and more tech ways to study , but this is thread about ereader for lawyer books. Rickie and others have come up with good suggestions. Keep them coming.

[tompe]

Originally Posted by hermance

Look, I'm not saying that law students don't need to take lots of notes; virtually all post-graduate programs require intensive notetaking in class.

Why is this the case? Is the material not available in course books? And if you just are going to copy what the teacher write or say why do not the teacher distribute the material before the lecture so people can think instead of just copy?

[richman]

Originally Posted by tompe

Why is this the case? Is the material not available in course books? And if you just are going to copy what the teacher write or say why do not the teacher distribute the material before the lecture so people can think instead of just copy?

My experience for good grades was "think the way the teacher thought", not think for yourself.

Most of the most famous people failed regular school because they "thought"!

No, it's about being a Parrot for the classroom and for the teachers tests and then figure out how to answer the standardize tests the "way they want you to too" .

[davidspitzer]

Originally Posted by davidspitzer

I am a second year law student and I also work full time and have a family - The prospect of lugging around 65 pounds of book to and from work so I can read at lunch was an instant "no-go".

I buy the cheapest versions of the paper book (come on law book publishers get with the program already and produce ebook versions) - falling apart is fine and I cut the spine off so I have individual pages (Kinkos will do it for a nominal charge) I then run the pages through a Fujitsu scan snap scanner to PDF - I crop the pages to within millimeters of the text and delete all the pages before the actual page 1 so that the actual eBook pages match the physical pages that way I can also crop off the page numbers in some books

I have tried a dr1000, a kindle (no good at all since pdf support is minimal - and don’t even get me started on the page numbering weirdness - although the DX may be better I fear that the device will fail when trying to open a 1400 page pdf) and a Sony 505 - I have sold the DR1000 and stuck with the Sony 505 and here is why - the pdf support for large books was just too flakey on the DR1000 plus I feel they have priced themselves out of the market - The Sony 505 with a pdf converted to LRF has never had an issue with any scanned book even my 1400 page ones

For the 505 I ran the pdf's through pdrread 1.8.2 - and rotated the pages sideways and in thirds this gives you the maximum readability and takes up the maximum width of the screen - also it is very portable and convenient and I can pull it out unobtrusively when I have breaks in meetings etc - Since I alighned the page numbers - can simply type in 255 and go right to page 255 (note the picture below the page numbers don’t match because another trick I learned is I extract all my reading for a module (our classes are yearlong broken into 30 modules) and concatenate it so i can just read through all my topics without having to hunt and peck through 12 eBooks’)

With regards to copyright - since I purchased all the books I believe this falls under the "fair Use exception" much like ripping your cd to Itunes or at least I believe I have a strong case for such use - I attached a picture

The key though is getting them into electronic format - I don't just read them on my sony 505 but also on my pc and mac. Regardless, the first step is to get them into a PDf and OCR them - A previous poster was right you really need to get Adobe Acrobat pro or you wont get far. In Adobe Pro you can crop, delete, reorder and OCR the pages. Because of the extensive footnoting used in most law texts, I have found extracting the text alone to be less than useful. In my experience the book has to maintained as an image, but the ocr will allow you to search it on your PC.

Kinko's will cut the binding off, but at least near me, would not do the scanning for fear of copyright issues; so i scanned them myself. Afterwards I had them rebound at Kinkos with comb or spiral binding (depending on thickness) - not as asthetically pleasing but in some odd way more functional as the books now lie perfectly flat when open.

Bottom Line once in PDF format you can pretty much freely transform it to just about any ebook reader in the format of your choice

...Just a note my books on my Sony 505 are just for my transportation of the books and the linear reading of the assigned reading. I still hand write any notes as I find nothing else indelibly etches the information on my brain like writing it long hand (I am also a snob when it comes to writing as I use only Rhodia notebooks and a fountain pen for notes - Pelikan M200 with XXXF needlepoint accounting NIB and Noodler's Legal Lapis Ink to be precise) I believe one can not rely on a single medium exclusively and its the varied and continual application of many mediums that helps you to absorb the information. The reading is required but I put more focus on the substantive law. Pretty much everyone in my class has abandoned case briefing for abbreviated and to the point study guides and thorough but quick readings of the assigned class texts

[hermance]

Originally Posted by tompe

And if you just are going to copy what the teacher write or say why do not the teacher distribute the material before the lecture so people can think instead of just copy?

This is a good point. Many professors, myself included, do distribute lecture notes either before or after a class session. It might be worth thinking about a netbook as opposed to a dedicated e-reader, in case you would want to consult such files in class. It seems like most profs use PowerPoints to do this, though I'm not sure about your program of course.

[tablettweet]

Originally Posted by RickyMaveety

It all depends on the prof. And some profs are dead set against typing (and some get really pissed off about recording) in class. It is especially true in law school where they think, and there is some truth to this, that if you are recording, then you aren't paying attention in class. I happen to think the reverse is true, but that's me. There are students, even in college courses and grad school courses, who are idiots ... don't ask me how they got into school, but they did. I have seen professors ban a particular student from class for acting like a complete twit.

In addition, some profs find the background noise of several hundred students typing furiously away to be a bit distracting.

My absolute favorite combination would be a nice tablet PC for my textbooks, and a Livescribe pen and pad for taking handwritten notes. Livescribe has good OCR, and the voice recording feature is marvelous. The sound reproduction is amazing. Plus, you can easily sync your notes with the tablet. Also, recording is ultra subtle, so if you do have a prof, they probably won't even notice you are doing it.

The reason I wouldn't recommend just wandering around school and asking other students what they think or what they use, is that .... well, I'm assuming that your student wants to be in the top 5% of his or her class. Just wandering around the school means that 95% of the people that you talk to will be lower down in the class rankings than you want to be.

I started each graduate program with the idea that I wanted to be either at the very top of my class or in the top 5% at least. So, I found that not paying any attention to most of what my classmates said or recommended was very important in terms of succeeding.

They were all lovely people, and some of them (even the idiots) have gone on to be successful, but the bottom line when you are looking at positions post-graduate school is class ranking. So, why start taking tips from the people you are hoping to pass in the rankings??

Any good tablet will work. It's just that, if you are looking for something that won't break the bank, the TC1000 was and still is a great choice. It is lightweight, cheap, easy to upgrade, and .... having a licensed copy of Acrobat Pro is a great thing to have as you start a law practice. (Maybe not quite as important for a medical practice, but for law .... seriously important.)

Totally agreed with you on Livescribe ;])
I have a little question - Can I use Livescribe as MP3 player ?

[davidspitzer]

Originally Posted by RickyMaveety

No. Not at all. Also, I think a tablet is better than either a netbook or a regular notebook. My reasons being, the text is too small to read with the full page view on most netbooks, and most students, while in class need to see the full page while in class, without zooming in and out to read.

In fact, a two page view that you can actually read is very helpful. Also, with either a notebook or a netbook, the tendency is to try and type your notes. There isn't all that much space on the typical law school classroom desk, and some profs get really pissed off if they see a bunch of students typing. (I know this first hand. Many profs will assume that, if you are typing on a notebook PC in class, you must be writing emails to your friends, or twittering ... certainly NOT paying attention to them).

A tablet PC will usually allow you to take handwritten notes in class). Very easy to have your PDF text in one window, and another window open in which you can hand write class notes. This part is true of both medical school and law school. And, profs in both types of school may have a small hissy fit about typing in class. They are perhaps a bit behind the times, but they have a point about what students may or may not be doing on their PCs when typing in class (another reason that if the student is surfing the web or something .... it can be a major distraction to the students sitting next to them). You might still be doing it on a tablet, but it will be much less obvious to the teacher.

Just my two cents, but I've been through the mill at both schools, and a lot of my friends are now profs at both types of schools, so I do have a little more insight on this than most proponents of ebook readers.

Oh, and I just checked, there are a few on ebay right now for about $200. You could probably upgrade the drive and memory for not too much money as well, although, most students only need to have 3 or 4 textbooks on the device at any one time, and just the notes for the 3 or 4 classes you take each year, so masses of HD space are generally not an issue (although, for $100 you can get a great 500 GB portable USB HD). RAM is easy to upgrade.

So, for less than $400 ($800 or so if you get Adobe Acrobat Pro 9.0) you can have something that should get your student through his or her entire law school career and which would still be useful as they start being an attorney. I still use my TC1000 to this day as a backup in my law practice.

I am a law student, 2L, and I have scanned my books in both years. I used a sony 550 the first year and converted to lrf format (not perfect but usable). This year I have been using a Kindle DX and it has been steller. You can not notate in the pdf's on the Kindle DX, but I found it very hard to studey by trying to reread annotated pages - I simply take notes in a spiral notebook for those tidbits i want to highlight and the act of writing it cements it in my memory better. I transformed 56 lbs of books into my kindle on a fujitsu scansnap. For the the price of the Irex you can get the scanner (comes with acrobat) and the Kindle. Just make sure to scan using black and white as it. gives the clearest, fastest and smallest pdf.

Another quick note for law student all of the Kaplan study guides (PMBR series) are available in the kindle store for purchase for significantly less than the paper version ($20 or less)

[tablettweet]

If you are still want to buy Livescribe. Amazon has offered 38 percent discount one day deal. read it here.

[davidspitzer]

Originally Posted by kellemonster

So the DX would not be a good choice for this purpose?

I am a law student and i use the Kindle DX - I have had the DR1000 and annotating on the page does not move me - I scan the book in using the kinkos binding cutting method and then scan the pages using a fujitsu scansnap to PDF. I delete all the pages before page 1 on the PDF so that the physical pages match up with the virtual pages. When I am in class and the teacher says turn to page 324 - i choose goto page and enter 324 and i am right there - I also crop all the white space around the pages using acrobat pro thus maximizing the size of the font in the full page display

[angelad]

Originally Posted by tablettweet

If you are still want to buy Livescribe. Amazon has offered 38 percent discount one day deal. read it here.

That's pretty nice.

[pboss]

Originally Posted by tablettweet

If you are still want to buy Livescribe. Amazon has offered 38 percent discount one day deal. read it here.

Check your iPad banner! Nice blog.

[richman]

gee, I would have to check out the ipad if I was gonna do law school. What a difference a YEAR makes!