Summer is a good time to catch up on reading. At least for me. Weekend afternoons or weekday evenings are great reading times in the backyard, when the world slows down a bit and I can actually ponder what I just read. That is, until the mosquitos arrive and try to carry me away. Then, it’s off to the screened porch or the cool of the basement.

Usually, I’m rotating three books at a time: one light reading, one history, and one professional development. My current history book is U.W.-Madison professor John M. Cooper’s Woodrow Wilson: A Biography and my light reading is a popular history of the 1849 California gold rush. My current professional development book is John Kotter’s Leading Change.

State Bar of Wisconsin PINNACLE books provide useful, up-to-date professional development reading and research resources. The State Bar’s Professional Development Department, producer of PINNACLE books (and seminars), just wrapped up publishing for the 2015 fiscal year: 54 titles in the last 12 months. This includes 27 supplements to books already in print, 10 revisions or new editions of current titles, 15 codebooks in both print and ebook formats, and two new titles, Sexual Orientation and the Law and The Good-Standing Guide for Wisconsin Attorneys.

The Good-Standing Guide is free to all State Bar members in good standing. Log in to WisBar^®, go to myStateBar, and click on myMedia. The Good-Standing Guide ebook is under My Downloadable Products.

The State Bar is a small publisher. We don’t print 100,000 copies of anything. Quantities range from 50 to 1,200. Most press runs are 300 to 400 copies. Total pages printed for each publication vary widely from as few as 28 for the Sexual Orientation and the Law supplement to as many as 1,950 for the new edition of Family Law Casenotes and Quotes. Altogether, in the 2015 fiscal year, we published more than 22,000 pages of information in 22,600 books, for a total of 9,676,000 impressions. And that doesn’t count publication through Books UnBound.

No matter how large or small, each supplement, revised edition, or new book is published only after many hours of thought and hard work from attorney authors, and the four attorney editors and four book production coordinators who work with the authors to create organized drafts, flesh out concepts, and then review the authors’ text for legal accuracy and clarity. That level of scrutiny accounts for the dependability of the final work product as well as 90 percent of the cost of the book. Printing, whether on paper or electronically, accounts for only approximately 10 percent of a publication’s cost.

So grab a book or three this summer. Read, ponder, enjoy. And don’t forget the bug spray.