Fastcase, the online legal research service, has begun publishing e-books in EPUB and .mobi formats, and the first set of Fastcase e-books consists of advance sheets of U.S. state and federal court decisions, according to Sean Doherty’s post, Fastcase’s Free E-Books May Disrupt Legal Book Publishing at Law Technology News, and the post, Fastcase eBooks: Advance Sheets are a Glimpse Into the Future, on Fastcase’s Legal Research Blog.
According to the Fastcase blog post, Fastcase advance sheets will be available “for each state, federal circuit, and U.S. Supreme Court”; will be free of charge and “licensed under [a] Creative Commons BY-SA license“; and will include summaries. Each e-Book Advance Sheet will contain “one month’s judicial opinions (designated as published and unpublished) for specific states or courts.”
According to Sean Doherty’s post, future Fastcase e-Books will include “e-book case reporters with official pagination and links” into the Fastcase database, as well as “topical reporters” on U.S. law, covering fields such as securities law and antitrust law.
According to the Fastcase blog post, Fastcase’s approach to e-Books is inspired in part by CALI‘s Free Law Reporter, which makes case law available as e-Books in EPUB format.
Fastcase’s adaptation of e-Book technology developed by CALI represents a notable example of knowledge-sharing between the nonprofit and for-profit sectors of the legal informatics community.
For more information, please see the Fastcase blog post, Sean Doherty’s post, Bob Ambrogi’s post, and Greg Lambert’s post.
For more information about Free Law Reporter, please see John Mayer’s post, The Free Law Reporter: Open Access to the Law and Beyond, at VoxPopuLII.
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