Big Kindle Store (Tiny Legal Section)

Yesterday, I wrote about Amazon's announcement of the Kindle DX, a new version of Amazon's popular ebook reader with a larger screen and more storage.  The device allows for a better display of large-format works such as textbooks and newspapers.  It also has a native PDF reader to display documents in the popular format.

All of which pointed to some Kindle applications for lawyers and law schools.  Documents could be shared on Kindles rather than printed on paper and distributed.  Law students could give up those heavy casebooks, and lawyers could keep all their legal practice books and treatises on one handy gadget.
Those days might be pretty far off, though.  Searching through the Kindle Store, there are precious few legal works to be found.  What titles are there are often quite dated, or deal with layman's questions about the law or how to get into law school.

Obviously, lawyers represent a niche market within the publishing world, and ebooks haven't matured to the point that the major publishers of legal works will sit up and take notice of the new technology.  But lawyers are big consumers of bound texts, and I know many lawyers who constantly bemoan the lack of portability of their favorite 12-volume practice treatise.  It would be nice to see some more legal books make it into the Kindle Store so lawyers could condense all of those massive tomes onto one lightweight device.

Until then, however, lawyers are stuck reading PDFs of motions on their Kindles to get their legal writing fix.