Thanks, Barton.

I have a formatting question for you (though others are welcome to chime in):

This Fall will be my third time using the book, and the students and I generally love it. Each year, however, I re-mix more and more of it (the biggest change last year was moving the assignments in gross/no naked licensing material to the front of the syllabus; the biggest change this year is clustering “[relatively] novel theories of liability and [relatively] novel defenses” as a group at the end of syllabus). My Fall 16 syllabus is now up at http://madisonian.net/home/?page_id=2272

Using the Word files to do this makes re-ordering the text feasible but awkward.

So, I wonder whether the text of the whole book could be rendered and made available in a more “modular” format, so that dragging and dropping [cases] [sections] [parts] of the text would allow an adopter to create a custom “book.” The analogy I have in mind is OOP in computer programming. Each unit of text could be moved around as the adopter wished; when the sequence of units was “locked in” to the adopter’s satisfaction, the product could be rendered as a single “book” (or series of Parts), in Word, and/or PDF, and/or whatever.

I may take this on myself, if the idea doesn’t appeal to you or is beyond the scope of the time that you have available. In that event, I’m curious to know how you produce the book in the first place: Do you manage all of the text in MS Word, or do you use writing software (and if so, which product)? I’ll ask our folks locally if they have ideas for how to manage this.

Thanks,

Mike