It would be easy to write this as "print is disappearing" — it's the expected narrative, and it isn't accurate. The real story is more specific, and more useful to understand if you're deciding what to do with a library right now.
Publishers are still printing it
Halsbury's Laws of England is still actively reissued in new bound print volumes — a 2025 reissue of one of its titles is available from specialist legal booksellers right now, reviewed and fully updated for that year. LexisNexis's own description of the work is explicit: it's "available in print and online," not one or the other. The publisher hasn't discontinued the physical edition, and there's no public indication it plans to.
That's worth stating plainly, because it undercuts the simplest version of the "print is dying" story. Supply hasn't disappeared.
The shift is in demand, not supply
What's actually changed is the decision firms make once they already have a digital subscription. A practice with Lexis+ or Westlaw doesn't need the print reissue to stay current — the digital version already does that, continuously, without anyone filing a supplement. Buying and maintaining the print edition on top of that becomes a choice rather than a necessity, and increasingly firms are choosing not to.
That's a genuinely different phenomenon from a publisher pulling a format. It's thousands of individual firms independently reaching the same practical conclusion — the print edition still exists, but the case for buying a new one, or replacing an old one, has quietly weakened.
What that actually means for existing sets
For a set already on the shelf, this cuts a particular way. It isn't becoming worthless — new reissues are still being published and sold, so the title remains an active, recognised part of the market, not an orphaned format nobody wants anymore. But its role inside a working practice has shifted from primary reference to something more like a backup, and backups are exactly the kind of asset that eventually gets reassessed.
We've written more specifically about recognising when that reassessment point has arrived, and about what genuinely drives a set's value once it has.
Not ready to part with yours yet? →
Wondering where your own set sits in this? A photograph of the shelves is enough for an honest answer.
Get a valuation →What we genuinely don't know
We won't guess at what happens in ten or twenty years. Publishing decisions are made by the publishers, not by us, and predicting them confidently would be exactly the kind of unverifiable claim we try not to make on this site. What's true today — active reissues, print and digital sold side by side — is what we can actually stand behind. Where practices' buying decisions take the market from here is a real, open question, not a foregone conclusion in either direction.
Whatever the long-term picture, today's decision about an existing set doesn't have to wait for it.
Get my free valuation →Common questions
FAQ
Are publishers still printing new law book volumes?
Yes. Halsbury's Laws of England, for instance, continues to be actively reissued in new bound print volumes, sold alongside its digital service rather than instead of it.
So why are print law libraries becoming less common in practice?
Because the decision that matters isn't whether a publisher still offers print — it's whether a firm chooses to keep buying and maintaining it once a digital subscription already covers the same material.
Will law book publishers eventually stop printing entirely?
We don't know, and wouldn't want to guess. What's verifiable today is that print continues to be published; what happens in years to come is genuinely uncertain.