West Study Aids Subscription Forum

[inchoate_con]

Anyone have a subscription? If so, how are the documents delivered? PDF, Word, etc.

[Iconoclast]

I have a subscription. I won't be renewing it.

The docs are viewed using a pretty lousy ebook reader. You can't page up/down and there are no hyperlinks from the table of contents. You can type in a page number to go directly to a page, but even that is cumbersome because the page number includes all the front matter crap (page i through xxiv or whatever) so if the section you want to go to starts on page 135, you have to guess how many pages are in the front matter and add it... so you enter 155 or so and then figure out if you're in front or behind your target page.

You can select text and copy it, but it doesn't retain any formatting, and even worse, adds in some bogus crap you have to get rid of.

About the only useful thing is printing... but even that is limited because you can only print one page at a time. I've taken some of the key pages I wanted and "printed" them to PDF or to One Note - both of which work fine, but one page at a time is a pain.

I understand that they want to make it so you don't sign up for one month, print everything out or make electronic copies, and then have the entire library at your disposal forever... but there is a line between protecting your content and making it too hard to use. They missed the line by a long shot in my opinion.

On a positive note, the selection of materials is good. Too bad they make it so cumbersome to use that the selection doesn't really matter.

HTH

[inchoate_con]

Thanks!

I scan most everything I read into OneNote, so I thought this might be a shortcut.

[schmohawk]

I have a subscription. I won't be renewing it.

The docs are viewed using a pretty lousy ebook reader. You can't page up/down and there are no hyperlinks from the table of contents. You can type in a page number to go directly to a page, but even that is cumbersome because the page number includes all the front matter crap (page i through xxiv or whatever) so if the section you want to go to starts on page 135, you have to guess how many pages are in the front matter and add it... so you enter 155 or so and then figure out if you're in front or behind your target page.

You can select text and copy it, but it doesn't retain any formatting, and even worse, adds in some bogus crap you have to get rid of.

About the only useful thing is printing... but even that is limited because you can only print one page at a time. I've taken some of the key pages I wanted and "printed" them to PDF or to One Note - both of which work fine, but one page at a time is a pain.

I understand that they want to make it so you don't sign up for one month, print everything out or make electronic copies, and then have the entire library at your disposal forever... but there is a line between protecting your content and making it too hard to use. They missed the line by a long shot in my opinion.

On a positive note, the selection of materials is good. Too bad they make it so cumbersome to use that the selection doesn't really matter.

HTH

I could not have said it any better. I bought the 3-month subscription almost a month ago, and while the material is great (especially the high court case summaries discussing the Erie doctrine) it is so unbelievably NOT user-friendly it's a joke. Scrolling up and down the pages is a headache every single time. It really discourages you from even using it, which is a shame. Westlaw needs to either improve this or do away with it entirely.