One of the most obvious uses of the iPad should be for law texts and reference books.

These are typically bulky, heavy tomes which aren’t easily portable. If you could transfer your whole bookshelf to the iPad and have it with you at all times, then why wouldn’t you?

LexisNexis have now made some of their books available as eBooks and have kindly let me have an eBook copy of Tolley’s Employment Law Handbook to review on the iPad.

The books aren’t available from the Apple iBook store so you have to download them from LexisNexis to your computer and then transfer them to the iPad. This is a simple drag and drop via iTunes if you want to add the book to iBooks (although it is best to read the rest of the this post first) or via the iTunes USB file transfer if you are using another eBook reader.

The book is in the ePub format, which means it is difficult to give a definitive review because the reading experience depends so much on which app you use to read it.

The most obvious choice is Apple’s own iBooks, but I found this to be almost unusable for a book of this size as it slows to a crawl when opening the book and for a minute or two afterwards.

The reason for this is that ePub books don’t have “pages” as such. It is a reflowable text format, which means that the amount of text on each “page” will depend on which eBook reader and settings you use.

It seems that iBooks calculates this for the whole book each time you open it or change settings (or change the iPad orientation). This process causes a progress bar to appear which slows iBooks almost to a standstill. On a normal novel you don’t notice this as it doesn’t take that long and you are generally reading one page at a time in order. By the time the indexing finishes you have probably only read a couple of pages and haven’t really noticed the slowdown.

For a textbook which is several thousand pages long and used as a reference rather than being read cover to cover it is a serious issue as it slows down searching and finding subjects in the index to an unacceptable crawl. I timed the process and it can take up to three minutes to open the book, search for a term and select the relevant page.

Luckily there is an answer. Stanza is a free eBook reader for iPhone and iPad which reads ePub books and doesn’t have the same speed issues as iBooks. I’m not quite sure why this is, but I think it only counts the pages in your current section and not the whole book.

Using Stanza the book presents a totally different experience. It is easy to browse the table of contents and index or search for terms. It all zips along pretty quickly without any noticeable lag.

You can add your own bookmarks and annotations and it is easy to select and copy text. This is very useful now that IOS 4.2 allows you to switch to another app like an email or document and paste text into it (copyright permitting of course!).

Stanza also allows quite a bit of flexibility in the formatting of the book. This includes not just the font, but also line spacing, margins, justification etc. Because the ePub format is similar to XHTML much of what you seen on the screen is a function of how your reader presents different formatting (body text, heading levels etc.) and it is also possible for publishers to use a form of CSS to dictate formatting so it may be possible for more “polished” formatting to be introduced as the market matures.

I still find that eBooks in Stanza don’t quite have the polished look which you expect from content on the iPad, but they are certainly functional. Freed from the iBooks startup lag it is much quicker to find a search term and hit the relevant page than it is with the paper copy of the book.

It is also possible to convert the eBooks into Kindle format if that is your thing (Lexis Nexis have instructions on their website) and Google have recently launched an eBook reader which may be a workable alternative to iBooks and Stanza.

Of course, you can also use your laptop or desktop to view the eBooks. I don’t know about other publishers, but the LexisNexis DRM allows the licensed user to install the books on their mobile and desktop devices.

Ultimately, I don’t believe that the ePub format as it is currently used allows law eBooks to reach their full potential. What I would really like to see is a more powerful format which allowed:

• Collaborative bookmarking and annotations (see what comments other lawyers in your firm have made on the book)

• Push updates from the publisher as they become available so the text is always current

• Ability to link to standard documents and resources on your firm’s own know-how system

• A great looking and lightning fast interface which delivered a true iDevice experience and wasn’t so dependent on the reader app used

I don’t know how much of this is dependent on the reader app and how much could be done by better use of the ePub format, but if someone could deliver this I believe it would drive a huge uptake in eLaw books.

For now though, eBooks on the iPad are still a worthwhile format… the prices of the LexisNexis ones come in at less than the paper equivalent and you can carry a whole library in your briefcase.

If you own an iPad and you are considering updating a law text I would recommend checking if it is available as an eBook first.