LexisNexis – Canadian Federal Courts Practice 2012 E-Book

A few months ago on SLAW I mentioned the ebook initiative by LexisNexis Canada for three of their court rules / legislative services.

They have now added a fourth title, being the Canadian Federal Courts Practice 2012 (Hughes, Renaud and Horne).

The books are published in epub format and can be read in a variety of readers. Purchasers of the print version get the ebook version included as part of their purchase.

Since lawyers seem to increasingly be using the iPad and other larger screen tablet devices, I think it is useful that publishers are experimenting with ebook versions of their print offerings.

On iBooks on the iPad, the normal ebooks functions are all there: search, highlighting, and the ability to add notes, create bookmarks and change font size.

With this new title, there appears to be two fairly significant improvements:

(i) the initial table of contents provides more functionality by providing both a link to the actual court rule or statute in addition to a detailed table of contents for the rule or statute. In most situations, readers would choose the detailed table of contents to make it easier to go directly to a particular rule or section of the statute.

(ii) the index provides clickable (touchable?) references to the particular rule or statute section number.

Although I did not do a detailed comparison with the print version, the ebook version appears to provide the same content as the print for this title, including selected commentary on relevant rules or statutes.

Where cases are cited in the commentary, they are note, however, hyperlinked for the version I used on the iPad, which is something that would be nice (but which I imagine is a lot of work on the publisher’s part and may not even be realistic on the epub format).