Lawyers may prove to be the early adopters of e-book technology, says Rupert White




Following the Gazette's revelation that legal publisher Sweet and Maxwell has been trialling the iRex Iliad Reader - a device that uses a clever screen technology once called electronic paper - on international commercial arbitrators, we knew we needed to take a look for ourselves.



Anyone following the development of e-paper will be excited to know that the technology now appears to be maturing rapidly. E-paper, broadly speaking, involves a screen embedded with thousands of capsules containing pigment that can be either pushed to the fore, making the 'pixel' near-black, or pulled to the back, making pixels a very light grey. There is no need, in theory, for a backlight, the power-hungriest element in current flat-panel screens, and the screens can be read in direct sunlight, also unlike current screens.



IRex supplied an Iliad for the Gazette with a set of fiction already installed, including works by Tolstoy, Austen and Conan Doyle. We also got a copy of one of the two texts Sweet & Maxwell had turned into e-books for trial members: Redfern and Hunter's Law and Practice of International Commercial Arbitration. Bedtime reading perhaps it is not, but as one of the trial members was Professor Martin Hunter himself, it was apt.



Pros and cons

The Iliad is remarkable in several respects. Reading texts that are not 'imaged' pages, such as text files and PDFs made from text files or properly set up for digital reading, were clear, easy to read and enjoyable to use. It is not like reading a paper book, and that issue of scales of grey, however widely separated, means that the contrast is still not as good as black ink on white paper. But in most lights there is no need for a backlight, and in outside light reading is, generally, improved rather than degraded. We liked the ability to write notes with the stylus and, in theory, annotate files.



We really liked the way that the e-book's screen allowed long-term image persistence. Because of the way the screen works, once an 'image' on the screen has been drawn, the e-book does not need to refresh it. So once you are looking at a page, you can put the e-book down for a serious period of time and when you return, there it will still be, just like a book. The e-book has used barely any power in the meantime. This is, to use a cliché, the Holy Grail of display technology and seeing it for real was heart-warming.



Page-turning is achieved through a flickable bar on the left of the unit, which pleasantly replicates the act of turning. There is WiFi built-in and several sockets for memory media, including a USB port which in one fell swoop puts it out in front of most, if not all, other mobile devices. The screen is generously sized at 8.1 inches and resolution is well above normal PCs at 160dpi.



Neither we nor Prof Hunter liked the way buttons were laid out on the Iliad. Some were too easy to strike while using the stylus. Others seemed bizarrely placed, or performed counter-intuitive functions. Start-up from power-off seemed slow, and screen refresh was also not as quick as we would have liked. Considering the Iliad runs a 400MHz Intel XScale processor, we cannot see where the slow-down comes from. At £445 it seems expensive. A glaring omission from an already quirky user interface/operating system is the lack of an ability to search for text within files.



Future technology, today

It is not just hundreds of books in a box, however, and we agree with Prof Hunter that it represents a very attractive and useful device. The current iteration, however, is an early adopter device that will have to be changed for general adoption.



'It's a nice try,' Prof Hunter told the Gazette. 'For me, writing on the screen and rubbing out is one of the most important features. I was very impressed by the ease of reading, and the clarity. One of its strengths is continuous reading, but one of the weaknesses is search and research. I think it makes sense for the future - if I can take 20 books [away with me], it would become a good research tool and a space-saving device.'



Sweet & Maxwell's conversion of Law and Practice of International Commercial Arbitration was sadly not particularly good for several reasons, mainly owing to the size of the pages on-screen, and without text searching we found using it frustrating. The Iliad did, however, completely renew our affection for Sherlock Holmes, which can only mean that the technology is almost there.



Sweet & Maxwell seems to agree. Its assessment of the trial appears to have been positive and it intimated that in the next few years, it will likely be going the way of the e-book: 'For lawyers, the potential benefits of e-books are huge. If entire libraries of e-books can be stored on one handheld e-reader with sufficient readability and functionality, and at the right price, demand could soar,' the publisher said.



Though books will not disappear, it says, 'lawyers' response to the concept and recognition of the potential advantages of books in electronic format is highly positive'. It too noted that the interface needed better navigation for legal practitioners, but said the technology was almost ready to take off.



So, watch this space. The e-book is, finally, coming.



LINK: http://www.iliadreader.co.uk