In mid-June Irwin Law held a book launch to celebrate the publication of The Lunatic and the Lords by Hon. Richard Schneider. Justice Schneider, as some readers will be aware, presides over the mental health court at Old City Hall in Toronto. His book is an account of the 1843 trial of Daniel M’Naughten for the murder of Edward Drummond, secretary to Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel. The verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity was so controversial that Queen Victoria ordered the House of Lords to review the verdict. The result of this review was the ‘M’Naughten Rules’ which continue to form the basis of the insanity defence in most common law jurisdictions. 

The venue for our book launch was Caversham booksellers on Harbord Street in Toronto. Caversham specializes in providing books for mental health professionals and, for those interested, has a good selection of materials on psychiatry and law. It seemed an ideal place to launch a book about criminal responsibility as it applies to mental disorder. On its website, Caversham, describes itself this way:

Caversham is a community of often eccentric but knowledgable staff and interesting, interested and indeed often eccentric customers. Many of our customers we know personally as local authors, or experts in their fields. Some of them visit us two or three times a week, while others are afraid to come to our store because of the dangerous appeal of many of our books.

About 60 (“interesting and often eccentric?”) people from both the legal and medical communities joined us for the launch. Precedent Magazine’s photographer, Chelsea Thomas, turned up to capture the event. 

Caversham has been around for over 20 years making it a bit of a marvel among independent book sellers in this day and age of box stores and online retailers. In fact, between 1993 and 2003, more than half the independent book retailers in North America disappeared, and their consumer market share went from over 30 percent to less than 10 percent. The list of casualties includes venerable businesses like Sandpiper Books in Calgary, Duthies in Vancouver, and Britnells in Toronto with others like This Ain’t the Rosedale Library on the endangered list. I can name four independent booksellers where there used to be ten in downtown Toronto and among those four that are still in operation two are specialty bookstores like Caversham. 

Specialty bookstores have survived and prospered, I think, principally because they create and foster, as the Caversham blurb says, a “community” made up of dedicated professional staff along with customers with definable interests and needs. Unlike the large generalist chain stores and online retailers, they are able to fill orders within reasonable time (no “usually ships in 6 weeks” on their ordering information). And, they are able to provide ‘one-stop shopping’, across a specific range of titles from a range publishers in their area of specialty assuming much the same role that wholesalers fill for institutional libraries. Finally, specialty stores provide a ‘destination’, physically or on the internet. 

All of which leads me to wonder why we no longer have legal book shops in Canada (with, of course, the notable exception of Wilson & Lafleur in Montreal). This is certainly not the case in the UK where dedicated legal bookstores such as Hammicks continue to serve legal practitioners and researchers. Perhaps the oldest of the British legal book shops is Wildy and Sons. Wildy’s was established in London in 1830 and has operated from the same location in Lincoln’s Inn Archway ever since. This is real “bricks and mortar” as they say. When I visited the shop a couple of years ago, John Sinkins, the current proprietor (whose family has been involved with the store for over a century), told me that they had recently undertaken some renovations which, among other things exposed floor boards which dated from about the 16^th century. John also told me that his first job at the shop in the early 70s after he graduated from university, was to take a wagon down the street once or twice a day to collect orders from Butterworths which were then sent off to Wildy’s customers. 

But Wildy and Sons, like Caversham, is much more than an historical artifact. Specialty shops like these have always provided a range of services to their local customers. With the advent of online retailing, they now attract an international clientele. Wildy, for example, ships books around the world often more quickly and more economically than the publishers from whom they buy them. Their staff attend and exhibit at international meetings including the Canadian Association of Law Libraries annual meeting. 

It isn’t too far-fetched a notion to suppose that the barristers who participated in Daniel M’Naughten’s murder trial in 1843 might well have wandered into the shop in Lincoln’s Inn archway in search of a treatise to help argue their case. After nearly two centuries of successfully providing service to the UK legal community, it not too presumptuous to suggest that the specialty store model might have some application in the Canadian legal marketplace. 

I am a bit surprised that no one has posted the news on Slaw that Ted Tjaden received the Denis Marshall Memorial Award for Excellence in Law Librarianship at the Canadian Law Libraries Association annual meeting on Monday. A description of the award can be found on the CALL website.

I assume that in due course the Association will be posting some sort of testimonial to Ted on their website along with pictures of the award presentation, but I‘m quite certain that Slaw readers will want to send their congratulations to Ted as well. We are certainly proud to have Ted as one of Irwin Law’s authors and look forward to the third edition of his Legal Research and Writing text which will be published later this month.

I might also mention that CALL presented a new award to Helen Rentis in recognition of Helen’s long service to the legal information community. Helen will be known to many Slaw readers. She has been a force in Canadian legal publishing for many years, first as a sales rep for Butterworths and, for the last fifteen or so years, as an independent sales agent for legal publishers around the world including Irwin Law. Publishers and customers alike have benefitted from her incredible knowledge, her amazing attention to detail, and her unfailing good spirits. We are certainly proud to have Helen selling Irwin Law’s products but more importantly I am honoured to call her my friend. Well done Helen.

A great deal has been written both here and elsewhere about the future of publishing in general, and book publishing in particular. And while there are probably as many different prognostications as there are prognosticators, my impression is that a solid majority of those who have commented on these things are in agreement that the publishing industry, as we know it, will soon become a thing of the past. According to a recent piece by novelist Jon Evans in The Walrus, ((Jon Evans, "Apocalypse Soon: The Future of Reading," The Walrus 4:7 (September, 2007) 38.)) which Neil Campbell cited in his post a couple of weeks ago, “book publishing is a dinosaur industry, and there’s a big scary meteor on the way.”

The argument goes something like this. First, we are in the midst of a profound cultural and economic shift, aided and abetted by technology, wherein intellectual property becomes a "public good" (in the economic rather than normative sense of the word). Second, printed books are a highly inefficient means of delivering information, particularly in this new world, and while they may have some lingering aesthetic appeal that too will disappear as new devices such as Sony’s e-book reader continue to improve on the display of text on screen. Evans compares books to vinyl recordings. And finally, traditional book publishers will have a diminished role, if they have one at all, in bringing creators to consumers. In the new world, so it goes, anyone can be a publisher.

The first part of this argument is, of course, subject to serious and wide-ranging discussion and debate among the chattering (and blogging classes). Indeed it is a topic to which I would very much like to return in a future posting. Similarly, the future of the printed page has received a considerable amount of attention. But the digitization of legal information has been a fact of life for legal publishers and their customers for at least two decades. There is, I would argue, a general consensus among both information providers and information users that the electronic storage and online retrieval of large amounts of legal information, is inherently more efficient and, as Ted Tjaden points out in his posting this week, an increasing number of previously print-only monographs, treatises, and textbooks now coexist in both print and electronic formats. At Irwin Law we have been making books available on Quicklaw since 1998. In 2005 we published Michael Geist’s In The Public Interest under a creative commons copyright in both digital and paper. Last year we launched stand alone digital editions in the VBK format, and we are currently working on networked e-books for academic libraries. All of these activities have given us and our customers the chance to evaluate platforms and technologies. The jury, as they say, is still out. It is interesting to note that while the number of our digital products continues to grow, their share of overall sales has decreased in recent years. Book sales continue to grow much faster.

But what about the role of publishers? Here, I think, Evans and others demonstrate a misunderstanding of what it is publishers actually do. Particularly in scientific and professional publishing, of which legal publishing is a subset, the course a manuscript takes on the road from the desktop of an author to the hands of a reader involves a great deal more than simply putting ink on paper. It includes peer review, rigorous editorial scrutiny and intervention, fact checking, careful and creative design and production, and a host of other activities. These are the things that stand behind the publisher’s imprint and signify to the reader that the information is reliable. In a sense, publishers impose a system of validation which the legal community and others have come to rely upon. It is a model, I would argue, that is going to be difficult to replace.

The English language Walter Owen Book Prize is awarded every other year by the Foundation for Legal Research to the author(s) of a book which "represents an outstanding new contribution to Canadian legal literature and which enhances the quality of legal research in Canada." For those who might have missed it, the 2007 prize was awarded at the CBA in Calgary this past weekend. This year the judges' panel split the prize between John Swan for his new Contracts text, published by Butterworths, and Ari Kaplan for his book on Pension Law which is published in the Irwin Law Essentials of Canadian Law series.

The award carries with it a purse of $10,000, not quite in league with the Giller prize but not too shabby, nonetheless. Congratulations to Both Ari and John.