Apple’s iPad at the core of “e-book viewer” trial

A jury in Denver will weigh a battle between a small appmaker and an aviation-navigation titan.

Does Apple’s iPad fall under the “e-book viewer” category?

Ajury in Denverwill be asked to make that determination to settle a high-stakes contract dispute between a small appmaker and Jeppesen Sanderson, the aviation-navigation giant headquartered in Englewood.

At the heart of the case is the Jeppesen FliteDeck app that thousands of pilots — including those with major carriers such as United and Frontier Airlines — now use on an iPad in the cockpit instead of heavy binders filled with paper flight manuals.

SolidFX claims its 2009 contract to develop apps for accessing Jeppesen’s terminal charts on ebook viewers en- compasses the iPad, originally released in 2010. In fact, SolidFX says it chose the term e-book viewer rather than the more widely used “e-book reader” to cover “future devices that allowed for viewing of e-books that were suitable for the airplane cockpit.”

According to court documents, Jeppesen argues that “the iPad is not an ‘e-book viewer’ simply because a user can read an e-book on it any more than an iPad is a digital camera just because it can be used to take digital photos.”

Rather than license its charts for the lucrative iPad app market, Jeppesen developed its program, which the company has saidwas downloaded more than 130,000 times during the first year of release.

U.S. District Judge William Martinez considers both arguments to be reasonable, setting the stage for a jury trial, an increasingly rare occurrence for federal civil