Category: eBooks

Exact print-replica versions of Oxford University Press Scholarship Online monographs are rolling out this month. Print-replica PDFs for all UPSO law titles should be available by the end of March, 2016.

This development has been implemented primarily to ensure that UPSO titles conform to the requirements of the Bluebook citation rules in the United States, but also benefits those of our users worldwide, whether they be students, scholars or practitioners, where the issue of citing a print work is also important.¹

The UCI Law community has access to a wide selection of Oxford titles covering law and related subjects. If you’re on the UCI network, see www.universitypressscholarship.com/browse?t=OSO:law .

1. www.universitypressscholarship.com/newsitem/485/upso-law-books-will-now-have-exact-printreplica-pdfs

Bloomberg Law is now the exclusive online source for titles from the Practising Law Institute. PLI titles offer guidance on fairly narrow practice areas, and they include several titles that are updated yearly.

One way to browse the list of titles in Bloomberg Law is to go to Search & Browse > Books & Treatises. (Law students can register for a Bloomberg Law account at bloomberglaw.com/activate.)

This update brings up a couple of issues related to legal publishing, and academic publishing in general:

1. Digital still has room for improvement. The layout of the these titles is not highly optimized for on-screen reading. For example, links aren’t live. (Not in the indexes in the titles I checked, and not in the footnotes.) And there’s an awful lot of white space around the textual content. But page numbers are there, and footnotes are displayed at the bottom of each section so that the body text is scan-able. So, while this is a nice start, it still seems like we’re waiting for beautifully-designed and highly-usable digital titles from legal publishers.
2. Online is evolving. These titles used to be available from another online legal research vendor, but that changed this month. It’s yet another example of online content moving around as publishers and licensing agreements change.