I have noticed a sort of change in the terms used for ebooks lately.   As recently as a year ago, in all the various publicity that I get regularly from publishers of ebooks, they always used the term ebook to describe their literary efforts, but this is no longer always the case.

Literary apartheid?

A sort of separation between straightforward ebooks (novels and similar) and what we used to call “enhanced” ebooks seems to be happening, which can be confusing.  Now, when a publisher or writer sends me details of their latest highly enhanced ebook, they refer to it as an App, especially those who are aiming their work at iPad owners.

In one sense I suppose they are correct in using the term App instead of enhanced ebook, well perhaps two senses, as App is much shorter than enhanced ebook, and in this age of sound bites, abbreviations, Twitting and so on, brevity is a highly valued survival attribute – sadly in my view.

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What do all those terms you see in ereader reviews actually mean? The world of ereaders and ebooks has developed its own secret language over the few years that they have been in existence, and many of you reasonably enough have trouble with what they actually mean.

Not all of us are serious computer buffs in fact, and are simply interested to know if a particular ereader or ebook is what we are looking for, and I gather from my mail bag, loads of you struggle with the whole pile of “in terms” that have grown up around these devices.

So, in the spirit of helpfulness, I shall endeavour to translate some of the most common terms you will come across when looking at ereader or ebook specifications.

So here we go………………..

Ereader:

A portable electronic device that is designed specifically for you to read ebooks (see “ebook” below) and nothing much more.

Ebook:

An electronic book designed to be read on an ereader, similar to any document you would read on a computer. These can be read on ereaders, tablets or computers.

Tablet:

Generally larger than ereaders, and also much more complex, basically all tablets (iPad, Galaxy and so on) are in fact computers built into a simple flat box, thus the term ‘tablet” as with the Biblical “tablets”. Highly portable computers in fact.

Tablets are only interesting if you wish to do much more than simply read electronic books – they cost much more than ereaders.

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The New Zealand company Kiwa Media have come up with a whole range of what appear to be excellent ebook Apps for kids who are lucky enough to have access to an iPad – Which appears to be a surprisingly large group of kids I gather.   Not sure I would leave such an expensive gadget in the hands of a 4 to 6 year old, but others have different ideas obviously.

Anyhow, that aside, what we have here are a series of rather splendid highly interactive ebook Apps aimed at the age group 4 to 6, with all the interactive aspects one would expect now in such applications.  And I have to say that from those I have looked at, they have done a very good job with these ebooks, they are funny, well illustrated, the narrator’s voices are good and they work well too.

What is an ebook app?

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Kobo have sent out a Press Release announcing this fact, and extolling the features and ease of use of this new App, which will have the following features we are told:-

• Revamped Look and Feel
• A new and improved interface immerses you in your books
• A gorgeous library view that let’s you search and find your books easily
• Cloud Storage
• Cloud storage lets you access your entire library from wherever you are
• Never lose your books — they’re safe and secure in the Cloud
• Freedom to Read Anywhere
• Read on your desktop PC or even from your Windows 8 tablet

Got to love that verbiage… “Gorgeous” eh?

You will be able to download this App from both Kobo’s site and the Windows 8 App store quite soon.

Chegg is a well known website that has been set up as very complete system for renting and buying text books, both in their paper form and as online ebooks and further as a sort of almost Social Website for keeping track of the course material you are following.

Their basic idea is to rent students their paper text books for less than the actual cost of such text books, so students can make considerable savings in their annual text book budget.  In itself this would be a useful and desirable service for most students, but they have gone a step further and have set up a sort of cloud based e-text book service as well, so students can also work in a highly interactive way online with their e-text books, which thus offers a very wide range of useful extra functions when compared to paper text books.

This ebook reading system they have set up will work on any computer platform you might happen to have, be it a PC, an Apple or even an Android  based device… so no excuse not to use this system I feel.

Most of these extra goodies are briefly – but adequately – described in the video below so I shan’t go into a lot of detail here, but simply let you get that info from the video.

Here is that video:

So, now you have a broad idea of what they can offer you.

With their paper text books, they offer several possibilities, you can buy them, you can rent them, and you can sell them back to Chegg when you no longer need them, so basically you can keep all your paper text book affairs in the one place if you wish, which can have advantages obviously, if nothing else, it is simple and saves time.

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Oceanhouse Media have recently produced an App for the iPad and iPhone specifically intended for interactively reading “And to think I saw it on Mulberry Street“, which was the first book that Theodor Geisel (Dr. Seus) published for kids way back in 1937.

In this book, Dr. Seus’s main character is a small boy called Marco, and he fantasizes as he goes along with his father on his way home from school about all the things he sees as they go.  Elephants, Rajahs, and all manner of other wonderful things, rather to his father’s irritation, who in spite of having instructed Marco to keep his eyes open and to tell him what he sees, doesn’t approve of the wild runaway imagination his son lets rip on their walk home.

But we do, of course!

As this is an interactive version of the book, there are a number of useful and fun possibilities built into it:-

Read to Me

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