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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Metaplume have come up with yet another useful ebook, this time all about the best Apps to make your mobile phone into a control centre for all your media fun.

Glorying in the name of “Turn Your Android Phone or Tablet into a Multimedia Hub”, this ebook of about 55 pages will walk you through a range of Android Apps that in combination will turn your smart phone or Android Tablet into an amazing Media centre.

The author (Fiona Gatt) has spent a fair bit of time it seems trying out no end of Android Apps in order to find the best set of Apps (all free ones, by the way), and has come up with a set that will make your videos, music, pictures and so on all work happily together.

She covers the following points in this ebook:

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Apple doesn’t want you to buy ebooks from other companies on their devices:

In a rather depressing example of how much control Apple want to have over anything that uses their various devices (ereaders, tablets, phones) they have rejected the Apps that allowed you to connect directly to the Kobo, Nook, Kindle and Google online ebook stores from your Apple gadget.

The basic thing that Apple didn’t like was that those Apps allowed you to connect directly to these other ebook stores from within your Apple device, and thus avoided those companies having to pay Apple the 30% of the sale price of those ebooks.

The kindle and Kobo Apps that are now updated, link you to Safari, and then to their websites , thus no longer directly to them, Google Books seem to have disappeared entirely from the world of Apple.

And Sony never even got started with an App for Apple gadgets.

To put it simply, what this now means for us consumers is that if we happen to own an  Apple device and wish to use this to read our ebooks, we either are forced to buy them from Apple, or do so via Safari, so no more simply click in an App and go directly to the  ebook store of those companies.

Whilst I can understand that Apple want the money, I am amazed that a company can be so controlling of its customers, and even more amazed that its customers don’t rise up and tell Apple to pull their skull in and stop being so controlling.

As a relaxed Windows user, I am happily not bothered by this silly control freakery that Apple is demonstrating more and more