Excellent piece. I would add two things.

First, I think the strategy of Black’s is in part about providing you with a better user experience, but also to extend and increase the margins on its best selling book. The cost of printing and producing Black’s is undoubtedly less than what it took to make the electronic applications. Because it has such a long shelf life (5 years, but it used to be 10), and Thomson has it’s own printing facility, books are definitely cheaper. Factor in Apple’s 30% and your margins on books look even better. The key to the app’s success though is to get you to buy an updated version every year. Besides, the odds are you won’t have your cell phone for that long.

Second, your discussion on filters could be expanded to those secondary sources you mention. We all rely on good search and a good UI to help us navigate secondary sources, and I think that has made publishers and authors lazy about things are written, organized, and designed. So what if a book is 2,000 pages long, you can search it and find what you want. But even the best search can’t fix a poorly designed book. As a researcher, you know the bad books. You know the ones that are updated with the pocket part mentality. There are too many of them, and they are poor filters of the larger body of law. Our filtering system won’t improve until both the front and back ends are rethought and redesigned.

I plan to use Google Scholar for source-location, and can foresee copying a list of cites into WL (after *I* do the work of sorting numerically by jurisdiction so I can have a chronological ordering of cases, since this fundamental database function is absent from WL’s interface) to “Find & Print” to PDF.

I would love to see some educators put students searching head-to-head on Google Scholar, Westlaw and Lexis. My hypothesis is that the usability of Google Scholar, even given the more limited content, will result in better quality results.

Thank you again for highlighting these basic flaws in these systems, which, as you point out, could be fixed with some very basic standards-compliance measures on the site design side.

This post was mentioned on Twitter by trbruce: Now in VoxPopuLII : @tomboone on duopolies and web usability. Wonder what duopoly he could be talking about…..? http://bit.ly/4nPNx9…