I want to sign off on my guest stint (thanks PrawfsBlawg!) with a simple thing that could make a big difference to the classroom: looseleaf casebooks. One of the best pieces of advice I got as a beginning professor was to order a looseleaf copy of my casebook. I could easily take pieces of the book home or read and review on the subway, coffeeshop, doctor’s waiting room, etc. As far as I know, this has long been a perk of professorship, with students either lugging the book or doing a self-help version by undoing the binding, but I just got an e-mail advertising looseleaf casebooks for students. Why did it take so long? 40% cheaper? Too easy to copy? But I wonder if preparation would improve if the weight of the book had no impact on what students carried around….
Posted by Verity Winship on September 3, 2009 at 05:01 PM
Comments
Interesting to think about the effects on reselling casebooks. If that’s right, I wonder why it took these companies so long to make this move. Maybe the technological writing is on the wall, as some other comments and recent posts suggest.
Posted by: Verity Winship | Sep 3, 2009 9:17:18 PM
I could be wrong, but my understanding is that publishers are moving fast toward offering loose-leaf copies of their books to students. It makes it a lot harder for them to resell their used books, which in turn stimulates the new-copy sales market.
Filthy lucre strikes again.
Posted by: Bill Araiza | Sep 3, 2009 9:01:03 PM
To the same effect, Verity, I ask for electronic PDF’s of the casebook so I can put everything on my laptop and just have that to take with me. Thanks for your wonderful posts. See you soon, I hope.
Posted by: Dan Markel | Sep 3, 2009 8:11:19 PM
Maybe another argument for giving out individual, unedited cases without a casebook–less to lug.
Posted by: Howard Wasserman | Sep 3, 2009 5:46:56 PM