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On How To Make Use Of A Mobile eBook ReaderMonday, July 12. 2010
Some months ago I had contemplated going deeper into technologies and issues of e-books and mobile e-book readers. Starting point was some kind of discontent with the format of a blog for articles that exceed some threshold of length comfortable to be consumed on a normal desktop or notebook screen. Would it make sense to create from time to time an article with more length than appropriate for a blog and then disseminating it on-line as an e-book? An on-line search session aiming at free authoring tools for use under Linux lead me to two software packages:
 ePUB Logo If you go to the technical details of epub then you will be relieved to learn that an EPUB file uses XHTML 1.1 (or DTBook) to construct the content of a book as of version 2.0. With other words, if you have some text as XHTML or at least HTML then you are very close to create an epub e-book. And creating XHTML texts is quite simple; for example, you can create some text using OpenOffice and then export it as XHTML. In order to obtain an .epub file, one or more XHTML file(s) with text, image file(s), and CSS style sheet file(s) have to be put into a container file using the well-known zip algorithm. Both Calibre as well as Sigil can do that job for you. While Calibre appears to attempt to hide the bits and bytes from the user, Sigil gives you full control on every bit within the .epub container file by means of some more sophisticated XHTML editor. Well, this is the point where pure theory does not bring you farther. Hence, last week I decided to purchase my first mobile e-book reader gagdet ever, and it is a Sony PRS-600 with a 6", 600 x 800 pixel screen utilising E Ink® Vizplex™ technology to deliver a paper-like display which is fully readable in direct sunlight. After having tinkered around with the device for a while I must say that I hardly can imagine to read a full, say, 1000 pages novel thereon. Compared to usual book formats, the screen is rather small, and the display does not create a black on bright white reading experience. In fact, the background colour of the screen appears to be some sort of light grey, depending on the angle of view. However, even larger books in epub format rarely exceed a few MB, and if you extend the built-in memory of 512 MB by inserting a SD card with another 4 GB or so then you can carry a huge amount of texts with you. And, with a single one battery cycle you can work many days, if not even a few weeks. But how to use such a powerful device in a professional context? Since many years I virtually do not use any commercial paper-based loose-leaf-collections with basic legal texts like statutory laws, international treaties, or EU law. They are expensive, and if you really need them you will regularly discover that either you or your secretary has failed to sort in recent supplemental sets. Hence, I prefer to consult semi-official websites close to the German Government (for German law), the website of the European Patent Office (for EPC matters), the OHIM website (for EU law in the field of EU trade marks and designs), and the Eur-Lex website (for EU law). However, Internet access is not always available, and it might be boring to click trough large tree structures of such websites until reaching the desired text. So, I thought it would be nice to have the equivalent of commercial paper based loose-leaf-collections with basic legal texts as a collection of epub files. However, when conducting an on-line search, the result is quite meager. Maybe that commercial publishers stay away from DRM-free epub files because of they can be copied easily. I won't accept any e-book files with built-in DRM encryption schemes because of in my view it is necessary to have access to old law even after many years. To this end you will need to create archives for bitstream preservation. With DRM-degraded e-books you can't create such archives and, hence, you must take into account some probability that files will go forever after a few years as soon as your e-book reader gadget device breaks and gets replaced by another one. On the same line of arguing I do not intend to buy a device like Kindle from Amazon where DRM protected texts can be delivered over the air via UMTS but where Amazon can take away any text from your own Kindle at any time at their own discretion. The traditional concept of private ownership of the customer on reproduction pieces of copyrighted works is completely undermined this way. Hence, if statutory texts etc. are not available in a proper format commercially, why not creating corresponding e-books in DIY mode? No sooner said than done: As an experiment and example, I took the Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property as it is available on the website of WIPO. On the left-hand side there is a navigation menue which should not get included into the e-book. Hence, I took a Firefox browser, marked the text of the Convention without any navigation elements, and had a right click with the mouse to select "View selection source" in the context menue. Then another browser window pops up, and the proper source code portion is already marked. Another right click with the mouse, and the source code is captured in the paste buffer ready to get pasted into the Sigil XHTML editor. I did not bother if the WIPO sources really are XHTML compliant; in the effect I got some usable .epub file with the Paris Convention therein. I've tested it on my Sony device, and it was OK. Maybe that the layout might still need to be slightly improved but the e-book appears to be usable in general terms. What about the copyright issue? Well, in Germany I feel relatively safe because of Sect. 5 of German Copyright Act says that laws, ordinances, official decrees and notices as also decisions and official grounds of decisions shall not enjoy copyright protection. To be honest, I do not know if this also extends to texts of international organisations like WIPO, EPO, or EU. But I would be quite surprised if WIPO or EPO go after attorneys transforming laws from the respective websites into .epub files for their professional work. Quite another question is, however, if the public should politically demand the state and transnational institutions like WIPO, EPO, and EU offering basic legal texts on their own websites not only in .html and .pdf format but also as .epub e-book file. For an attorney, sitting down for hours and creating collections of epub files with basic legal texts in DIY mode probably can't be the ultimate solution. But this should not make you forget that thanks to open formats like epub, e-book reader gadgets need not to be restricted to one-way devices making you merely consuming contents delivered commercially by some more or less big companies. Once you have understood how to work with the authoring tools mentioned above, it is very easy to create your own e-book content. Time will tell for what kinds of purposes this ability can be used. (Photo: (C) 2009 by Marit & Toomas Hinnosaar via Flickr under the terms of a CC licence) Tools
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Thank you for your article on using e-book readers in the profession of a patent attorney. I myself started using an e-book reader one and a half year ago. My conclusion is that an e-book reader certainly has a chance of becoming a practical asset, but at present there are still quite some shortcomings.
First the advantageous: The display of e-book readers is definitely superior to your eyes and comes close to a paperlike experience, although, as noted, the contrast could still be improved. It is more like reading on non-bleached, recycled paper. (E-book readers without touch displays, or alternatively using Wacom technology apparently have a slightly better contrast.) Furthermore, you can bring an enormous load of documents, legal texts, case law, prior art, the complete file wrapper of a case, and as a bonus: your complete library of novels. The devices are now small, and light enough to be really portable and battery life is suffient for days of reading. However, the display is still slow (0.5 - 1 second, but for large scanned documents or complex PDF documents, this can turn into seconds). For reading a book from cover to cover this (0.5 - 1 second) is not really a problem, but when jumping through a document back and forth, it can become a pain. Here, the documents themselves could be of help, by including navigational aids such as cross reference links and tables of contents. That way one at least jumps right to the correct page. PDF documents already available on the net (for example Guidelines for Examination before the EPO) do not contain linked cross references. This is where an e-book reader could really shine. Preparing your own material, as described in the article, can be quite laborious. Especially, when one decides to increase the navigational options by including table of contents and linked cross references. As mentioned, a 6 inch screen is rather limited in size. Especially for prior art documents. Most patent publications are PDFs with the text embedded as images. This means one has to pan through the page, because the display is too small. I am using a 10.8 inch display myself, which is just big enough for displaying a complete page of a patent publication. EP documents are quite alright, US documents use a slightly smaller print and are, as far as I am concerned, on the limit of what is considered comfortable reading. (It helps to use the reader in landscape mode, and fit the page to page width, but then with the two column format used in US publications, one is scrolling up and down again. However, it is usable.) Lastly, because PDF patent publications use embedded images for representing text, they do not allow for text searching. Another possible strength of an e-book reader becomes less valuable this way. My remarks above concentrate a bit on PDF. This is because that is the format I ended up using the most. As noted, at present ePub is not readily available, and after one and a half year of use, I prefer not to spend too much time reassembling my own material. For example, if one was to prepare an EPC text, the EPO offers a PDF document, or an enormous tree of HTML-pages, each page containing one EPC article or rule. This takes too much time for a single individual to assemble and then maintain with each change of the rules. I now stick to the PDF document (which however is not updated with every change of the rules). Probably, in a number of years e-reader hardware has improved. I envisage devices with the size and weight of an iPad, a fast colour e-paper display (either eInk, or an alternative reflective technology) and the processing power of a laptop. By that time the publishing industry hopefully has picked up the line too and publishes legal texts in e-book formats (indeed hopefully without DRM so I can still use it on my new devices, even after 10 or 15 years), the documents containing tables of contents and fully cross linked by cross references. At present I am the only patent attorney in our firm working with an e-book reader. Although my colleagues find it interesting, I still do not consider it a break through product within our professional business and do not encourage my colleagues to use an e-reader. (However, neither do I discourage them.) We need some more evolution for that.
Hi, this web site is good. It is a WYSIWYG ebook editor designed to edit books in ePub format. It is more like reading on non-bleached, recycled paper. (E-book readers without touch displays, or alternatively using Wacom technology apparently have a slightly better contrast.)
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