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Let’s see how these predictions look in a decade:

2013 – EBook sales surpass all other book sales, even used books. EMagazines begin cutting into paper magazine sales.
2014 – Publishers begin “subsidized” e-reader trials. Newspapers, magazines, and book publishers will attempt to create hardware lockins for their wares. They will fail.
2015 – The death of the Mom and Pops. Smaller book stores will use the real estate to sell coffee and Wi-Fi. Collectable bookstores will still exist in the margins.
2016 – Lifestyle magazines as well as most popular Conde Nast titles will go tablet-only.
2018 – The last Barnes & Noble store converts to a cafe and digital access point.
2019 – B&N and Amazon’s publishing arms – including self-pub – will dwarf all other publishing.
2019 – The great culling of the publishers. Smaller houses may survive but not many of them. The giants like Random House and Penguin will calve their smaller houses into e-only ventures. The last of the “publisher subsidized” tablet devices will falter.
2020 – Nearly every middle school to college student will have an e-reader. Textbooks will slowly disappear.
2023 – Epaper will make ereaders as thin as a few sheets of paper.
2025 – The transition is complete even in most of the developing world. The book is, at best, an artifact and at worst a nuisance. Book collections won’t disappear – hold-outs will exist and a subset of readers will still print books – but generally all publishing will exist digitally.

As is, I want the word kindle to become a verb, like xerox. Instead of reading a book, you kindle a book.

Viewing two-dimensional images of the environment, as they occur in computer games, leads to sustained changes in the strength of nerve cell connections in the brain. In Cerebral Cortex, Prof. Dr. Denise Manahan-Vaughan and Anne Kemp of the RUB Department for Neurophysiology report about these findings. When the researchers presented rats with new spatial environments on a computer screen, they observed long-lasting changes in the communication between nerve cells in a brain structure which is important for long-term memory (hippocampus). Thus, the researchers showed for the first time that active exploration of the environment is not necessary to obtain this effect.

“These results help to understand to what extent digital learning in the brain competes with learning in the physical environment“, says Manahan-Vaughan. “This is interesting for developing strategies for use of digital media in school. Such strategies can prove a useful antidote to the apathy in children towards the traditional teaching methods.”

“School teachers, particularly at the junior school level have become increasingly concerned at their observations that each generation of school children exhibits shorter attention spans and poorer retention abilities than the previous generation”, states Manahan-Vaughan. “One explanation for this is the ever increasing use of the digital media by school children. Our results indeed show that mammals can learn equally well when they passively view information on a computer screen compared to actively exploring the environment for this information. Television or computer games after school may compete with the information learned in school.”

In other words, we can learn from computers.

Larry Ribstein ponders whether the United States would recognize Indian law firms.

I gave a moot job talk at the University of Kentucky yesterday, and a professor who specializes in commercial law made a point that should have been obvious about my work on social cost–it includes actual costs in dollars and cents, usually in the form of tax bills. Brown v. Plata, for example, imposes a tangible monetary liberty cost on the people who California who now have to deal with these released prisoners.

From the Sacramento Bee:

In less than two weeks, Sacramento County will start assuming responsibility for thousands of inmates and parolees now watched over by the state.  The pending shift has touched off a debate within the county over how to spend millions of dollars also coming from the state — whether to create more jail beds or fund treatment programs aimed at keeping convicts from offending again.

The state budget approved earlier this year gave counties responsibility for lower-level offenders released from prison or sentenced under new requirements.  Counties will get offenders convicted of crimes called the “triple-nons”: nonserious, nonviolent and nonsexual.

Sacramento County expects to receive about 200 parolees and newly sentenced offenders next month. When the transition is complete in four years, the county can expect responsibility for 2,300 additional inmates and parolees….

County law enforcement officials have spent months discussing how to divvy up $13.1 million the county will receive from the state for this year.  They don’t expect to take a plan to the Board of Supervisors for final approval until late October….

Counties with completed plans have taken different approaches.  In Fresno County, where a crowded jail has led to thousands of early releases, officials have decided to use the bulk of their new funds to reopen part of the jail.  San Francisco County plans to spend some of its funding on jails, but most of the money will go to alternatives to incarceration, including drug treatment and work training.

Edward Latessa, a nationally recognized expert on community corrections, told a crowd of California probation officers earlier this year that treatment is more effective than punishment at keeping offenders from committing new crimes.  He also said punishment alone doesn’t work.  He said the most effective programs work on changing attitudes — which is what Sacramento County’s Probation Department hopes to achieve with one of its proposals.  The department wants to use cognitive behavioral therapy for offenders who report to a day center.

Such an approach would be more effective than simply putting people in jail, said Don Meyer, the county’s chief probation officer.  “This county has been successful at locking people up,” he said. “This county has not been successful at stopping the problem (of crime).”…

Gov. Jerry Brown made it a cornerstone of his budget to shift responsibility for lower-level inmates to counties.  Since then, state corrections and county probation officials have pushed for more treatment programs as an alternative to locking people up.  But some Sacramento County officials said they aren’t ready to let more offenders out on the street.

These costs, unlike abstract costs like liberty or security, can actually be quantified (and this makes them much more real than abstract costs).

Doug Berman makes a good point I haven’t really considered before:

Further, America’s sentencing laws each year subjects only a few dozen aggravated murderers in a few states to the real prospect of a death sentence and execution.  And those aggravated murderers typically will face death as a punishment only if and when the victim’s family, and a set of prosecutors, and a set of jurors,and a set of judges all independently decide that death is a fair and fitting punishment.  Asserting that “discrimination and arbitrariness [and] the hallmarks of the death penalty” fails to acknowledge that (1) only a small number of aggravated murderers are even eligible for a death sentence, and (2) lots of victims and prosecutors and juries spare most aggravated murderers from actually receiving a death sentence, and (3) lots of judges and executive officials spare the most of those sentenced to death from actually getting executed.

Meanwhile, America’s sentencing laws each year subject thousands of lesser offenders to LWOP or functionalLWOP sentences (six years ago the US lifer count was over 130,000, but that included folks serving life with parole).  And often it merely takes one charging decision by a lone prosecutor or one sentencing decision by a lone trial judge to forever extinguish the chance for many lesser offenders to ever have even a chance to regain their liberty before dying in prison.  Further, there are strong reasons to fear that wrongful convictions, racial and economic and geographic biases, and ineffective lawyering are far bigger problems for the huge numbers facingLWOP than for the relatively tiny number facing death sentences.  Moreover, while SCOTUS rulings have ensured that no juvenile or mentally retarded aggravated murderers are on death row, there are still thousandsof juvenile offenders and probably even more mentally retarded offenders serving LWOP sentences throughout the United States (some of whom likely are wrongfully convicted and most of whom likely suffered from racial, economic and geographic biases and ineffective lawyering).