Research Tip – Navigating Emond Ebooks

May 22, 2020

By Ken Fox, Research Librarian

In my last post, I showed you how to find Emond Ebooks and enable your Adobe Flash Player. If you have not enabled Flash, please do so before proceeding with Emond, as the HTML version of the books offers limited functionality, and the exercises below will not work.

Emond ebooks vary slightly from book to book in the spatial configurations of their navigational controls, but most of the features are reasonably consistent (exceptions noted below). The basic commands are very similar to the Des Libris Irwin platform, so if you read that post, a lot of this may sound familiar.

Right now I am looking at Prosecuting and Defending Drug Cases by Gorham et al. In the bottom-left of the screen is a series of four icons which aid in navigation:

The magnifying glass is the zoom feature. From what I can see, this button only offers two levels of magnification: the default level where facing pages are displayed using the full height of the screen, and a “zoom in” level where the width is maximized for the facing pages. Other levels of magnification can be applied by using the touch pad on your laptop or the touch screen on your phone or tablet – moving two fingers apart to zoom in, together to zoom out.

The four-squares button displays thumbnail images of the pages. In this book, the thumbnails appear from left to right on the screen, superimposed over the book image. In others, they appear in a separate panel on the left side of the screen.

Moving from left to right, the next button brings up the clickable table of contents in a pop-up window that appears in the left panel. The Table of contents has its own search box, so by entering “aggravating” you can locate the section on “Aggravating and Mitigating Factors” in sentencing without clicking multiple headings to expand the contents down to that level.

The button on the far right is “Auto flip” – it makes the pages turn by themselves, about a page every 8 seconds.

Bottom centre of the screen is page navigation controls. The white box in the centre allows you to proceed to a numbered page. Remember to use the page numbers of the electronic document, which do not correspond to the page numbers in the book itself (e.g, page 58 in Prosecuting and Defending Drug Cases, as numbered on the page, is actually page 86 in the document).

The straight arrows advance one page forward or backward. The arrows pointing at vertical bars proceed to the front or back covers. The bent arrows work like the “back” and “forward” buttons in your browser – they take you to the previous page you were on, regardless of whether it is forward or backward in the book, and after using the “back” button, the “forward” button moves you in the opposite direction.

In the top right of the screen is the all-important search box which facilitates locating particular legal terms and concepts in a text:

The results display appears in a pop-up box to the left of the text. As with Des Libris (Irwin) ebooks, the “search” is actually a “find” feature that locates words within the text, which is treated as a single document. You are given a number of results, but they are “pages” – so multiple instances of the terms on the same page counts as one page. There are no search operators, filters, ranking or sorting capabilities.

Here’s the tricky part – the search feature in Emond ebooks varies depending on which book you are looking at. My two examples are both from the Criminal Law series: Criminal Appeals and Prosecuting and Defending Drug Cases.

In Prosecuting and Defending Drug Cases, I get 16 page-results for “mens rea” (always enter terms without quotes when searching in ebook formats), a common phrase in criminal law books.  The results display the first instance of the query terms on each page. All but one hit shows the matching phrase on the page. The one exception, though, is instructive for understanding how this search works. On page 85 the highlighted terms are “multidimensional” and “reasons” with only the letters “mens” and “rea” shaded. The two words appear in the same paragraph with about 50 words between them.

From this we learn two things:

1. this search is looking for both words, but not necessarily as a phrase – they may only be in relative proximity
2. the search applies automatic front and back truncation – it looks for the combination of letters anywhere within a word. So when I search for the word “rea” (which is a very unusual word), I get 244 page-results (area, reason, etc).

Unlike Des Libris, this platform does not supply a matching caps option or a “whole word” option.

For the present example, combinations of two words are an effective way of counteracting the plethora of results from a single-word search.

In Criminal Appeals: A Practitioner’s Handbook, the phrase “affidavit of merits” yields 280 page-results (almost the entire book). A quick glance shows that the same automatic truncation is in effect – but it is searching for ANY of the words, rather than all in a phrase, or in proximity. For the present example, the user would be advised to apply a single word search using either “affidavit” (14 pages) or “merits” (19).

For some phrases, such as “appeal book,” where both words are very common in the book, there is no way of using the search function to directly locate the phrase. The book has an index, so if you have an overwhelming number of hits, try flipping to the index at the back of the book to see if your terms occur there (but still apply the search function rather than attempt to pick out the terms by eye or hope that they appear as an alphabetized main heading).

Most (but not all) of the texts in Emond’s online collection have printing and text selection tools. The traditional icons for text select and print are generally located together, somewhere on the bottom of the screen.

Text select works well with some texts, provided you don’t try to grab too much. For some (such as Prosecuting and Defending Drug Cases), the tool is present, but formatting incompatibility between the copied text and my computer software prevents the copy from being usable. In still other texts, such as Criminal Appeals, neither tool appears at all.

As with Des Libris, there are is no “download” option per se, but the majority of texts have a “print” function which can be used to create PDF files. Clicking on the print icon brings up a dialogue box asking you to specify a print range (again, remember to use electronic document page number, not the page numbers on the book itself).

Clicking on “Print” then brings up your computer’s Print dialogue box, which will vary in appearance depending on your operating system. Look for an option to “print as PDF” or “Adobe PDF.” This command will then bring up a Save dialogue box, so you can choose a file location.

It bears repeating: Ebook formats are not designed for research purposes, but they have the benefit of allowing our legal publishing companies to release entire collections in a way that is affordable. Thus, some of the above tips are “workarounds” to enable the platform to do things it was not designed to do. If you know a workaround solution that is not mentioned here, please let us know in the comments or by email.