The Future of Scholarship: Self-Published and Digital?

Steve Bainbridge is trying an interesting experiment in legal publishing. Steve has just completed a guide to the auction duty of directors under Revlon. But instead of following one of the traditional routes—publishing it as a law review article or as a book through one of the  legal publishers, Steve is self-publishing. The book, Directors as Auctioneers: A Concise Guide to Revlon-Land, is available as a Kindle book from Amazon for $9.99.

Steve certainly doesn’t need to self-publish. His list of publications shames me. He’s in double figures in books and has published literally dozens of articles, many in top-20 law reviews. I’m sure he would have had no trouble finding a print outlet for this book.

In some ways, that makes this a less effective experiment than it might otherwise be. As Steve concedes, he already has a brand name, a reputation for quality. He doesn’t need an Oxford label or top-20 law review placement to attract people to his writing. The real experiment would be if someone like me tried this. But Steve's experiment is worth watching—and, since Amazon ranks e-book sales, we can all see for ourselves how successful Steve is. (After one day, he’s sitting at # 18,053.)

I’m strongly in favor of e-publishing, and I think e-publication will eventually supplant more traditional academic outlets, including law reviews. I don’t foresee a future where many of us will be able to charge for our articles, but I do foresee a future where those articles will be exclusively digital, and probably published without the intervention of student editors. A major hold-up right now is the e-reader; improvements are needed before doing all our academic reading on Kindles. I don’t like the Kindle reader interface and that may keep me from reading Steve’s new book, but I’m wishing Steve luck. I hope he succeeds.

-Steve Bradford