As the use of computers and computer-based networks continues to expand, content providers are preparing and distributing more and more content in electronic form. This content includes traditional media such as books, magazines, newspapers, newsletters, manuals, guides, references, articles, reports, documents, etc., that exist in print, as well as electronic media in which the aforesaid content exists in digital form or is transformed from print into digital form. The Internet, in particular, has facilitated the wider publication of digital content through downloading and display of images of digital content. As data transmission speeds increase, more and more images of pages of digital content are becoming available online. A page image allows a reader to see the page of content as it would appear in print.
However, while simply providing an image (or images) of digital content can be easily facilitated, images corresponding to the conversion of pages of a book into electronic form may not be well suited in some viewing scenarios. Typically, users want to have a reading experience of the digital images of a book that is close to or better than a reading experience of the print form of the book. It is also true that users want to read the digital images of the book without significant delay or discomfort. In current typical embodiments, the data transmission speeds of digital images of a book may be restricted by a bandwidth of a network. Consequently, only limited portions of the digital images of a book are downloaded at a time and displayed via the web browser. This approach may be useful to evenly distribute downloading time among many users and allocate a fraction of the bandwidth to each user. However this approach also poses some problems. For example, there can be a significant lag time (a delay between downloading each portion of the digital images), which will cause discomfort for the user. Further, within the display window, the movement from one portion to another of the displayed digital image can be halted for a moment if the selected portion has not yet been downloaded.
USPTO Backgrounds
USPTO Backgrounds