[blindlaw] accessing textbooks while in law school

[Nicholas Parsons]

The Kindle app for iPHone, iPad and iPod Touch is brilliant and completely accessible. You can read your books, take notes, look up words in its dictionary, and check what print page number you're on. Whether or not you can easily navigate by chapter and sub-section via the table of contents depends on how the publisher has formatted the book. But most new law books are properly formatted with hyperlinked tables of contents. The Kindle Store also has plenty of great law books. The one downside is that you can't read footnotes and as someone else mentioned these can be really important for law books.

iBooks is another highly accessible option but the iBooks Store does not have many law books. It does, however, read DRM free PDFs. I often get PDFs of law textbooks from publishers and then read them with iBooks. The footnotes just appear at the bottom of the page like ordinary text. I would, however, suggest you ask the publishers to provide properly formatted, hyperlinked tables of contents though if you do this. The other downside with iBooks is that it doesn't necessarily tell you which print page number you're on, unless it is written in the text of the page. However, Adobe Reader on Windows with JAWS will give you this information if it has been formatted properly.