Lawyers tend to be avid readers.  Much of what we read is professionally required (statutes, rules, case law, discovery responses, etc.).  But lawyers also read extensively for pleasure.  Having ready access to a steady stream of reading material is important to many of us.  Traditionally, that has meant well-stocked, but also bulky and unwieldy, bookshelves stocked with hard covers, paperbacks, and periodicals.  Today, it is just as likely to mean an ebook reader.

That is why the news yesterday from Amazon, as reported by Gizmodo, is so interesting.  Sales of ebooks for Amazon’s Kindle ebook readers have outstripped sales of hardcover books for the first time.  This trend may accelerate with the recent substantial price drops in both the standard-sized Kindle and the lawyer-worthy large-format Kindle DX.

As revealed by Amazon:

Over the past three months, for every 100 hardcover books Amazon.com has sold, it has sold 143 Kindle books. Over the past month, for every 100 hardcover books Amazon.com has sold, it has sold 180 Kindle books. This is across Amazon.com’s entire U.S. book business and includes sales of hardcover books where there is no Kindle edition. Free Kindle books are excluded and if included would make the number even higher.

So we are seeing with books what we’ve seen over the last decade with music.  Digital media is replacing physical media as the format of choice.  Just as the iTunes store and the iPod drove the move to digital music, Amazon and its Kindle are driving the move to ebooks.  The Apple iPad will help move that trend forward, although it is a slate or table computer, not truly an ebook reader.  Android and Windows 7 slate computers coming later this year will also promote ebook sales.

We see another form of this move from physical to digital everyday in our offices where on-line legal research services have effectively replaced a paper library for most research tasks. Also part of this trend is the move from locally installed software on a firm’s own servers to web-based hosted applications (software as a service) for everything from time and billing to practice management to word processing.  Read Ed Emmerson’s recent post on cloud computing for more information.  Being in the cloud is especially useful for firms or businesses with multiple offices in different locations or with a mobile workforce.  Affinity Consulting Group, for example, with offices around the Eastern U.S., uses a “hosted Exchange” service to better integrate email and calendar functions no matter where a consultant or staff member may be located.  It is a cloud-based tool that lets us serve you more efficiently.

Moving to cloud-based services from locally installed hardware and software can be a mind-set adjustment that isn’t easy for lawyers (or even some consultants).  Security and confidentiality concerns are usually at the forefront of the debate.  On the other hand, most small and medium-sized firms don’t do an adequate job of protecting their physical technology assets.  In many cases, moving to the cloud will improve security and reliability.  Each firm’s situation must be carefully analyzed.  We can help with that process.