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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In a survey by Verso on consumer book buying trends the response was very positive to the question  “If independent bookstores across the country were to market their own brand of a dedicated e-reader device, comparable in price and features to the leading competition (e.g. Kindle, Nook, Sony Reader), how likely would you be to purchase one?”

However, I have my doubts:

It seems to me that for independent book sellers to somehow get it organized to produce a universal dedicated ereader that they could sell in their stores, and thus sell ebooks to be read on these ereaders is more than a little far fetched.

Just think about it for a minute – The hassles of research and development of this ereader, then getting it manufactured for a reasonable price, and then the support….  The mind boggles more than a little!

Sell ebooks in the stores:

What would seem to me to be perhaps a better route for independent book stores to follow is to concentrate on finding practical ways of selling ebooks through their stores, and by this I don’t mean setting up online ebook stores, but selling ebooks literally in their stores, along with paper books of course.

High street ebook stores:

What I envisage here is that independent book shops continue to display and sell paper books as they have always done, and continue to offer the much valued personal contact to their customers that makes independent book stores such a pleasure to visit, but add a whole level of service by selling ebooks directly from the store.

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We all watched in some amazement as Borders went down with a gurgle not so long ago, and now it seems it may be Barnes and Noble’s turn to sink without trace.

If you happen to follow the stock markets, you may well have noticed that B & N’s stock has been going up and down like a yoyo this year.   Misleadingly it is currently looking reasonable, but this is not based on any real value.

They look healthy, but………

Currently they operate 704 bookstores in 50 states, as well as 635 college bookstores serving 4.6 million students and faculty. They also have the  Barnes & Noble eBookstore and provides Barnes & Noble eReader software.

The death of Borders – one of their main competitors had a small beneficial effect on them, raising their sales by about 2%.

However, they managed to lose about $57 million in sales.

Which is a situation that no company can survive for very long, obviously.

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Not only an Italian Kindle ebook store, but a Spanish Kindle ebook store as well.  Amazon seem to be taking Europe over, where will it end?

In a sort of concerted pincer attack, Amazon have launched not only an Italian ebook store, but also a Spanish one.

So now all you Spaniards will be able to buy a vast number of ebooks in Spanish and read them on the Spanish language version of the Kindle 4, Amazon’s latest and cheapest ereader.

To quote from the press release announcing this new online ebook store, Amazon had this to say:

– Amazon Spain today launched the Spanish Kindle Store offering customers a vast selection of over 22,000 Spanish-language Kindle books, including the most best sellers in Spain with 20 of the Top 30 El Cultural fiction and non-fiction best sellers, the largest selection of Catalan, Basque and Galician books–and over a thousand free classics in Spanish. The new store offers customers over 900,000 titles – including thousands of global best sellers – in English and other languages. Amazon also announced the new Kindle–the smallest, lightest and most affordable Kindle ever–is now available on Amazon.es for only 99EUR . Amazon.es customers can order the first Spanish-language Kindle today on www.amazon.es/kindle.

“We are excited to introduce the new Spanish Kindle Store which features the most best-sellers in Spain, the leading selection of titles in Catalan, Basque and Galician and also includes unique and exclusive titles from Rosa Montero,” said Gordon Willoughby, Director, EU Kindle. “Kindle is already the best-selling e-reader in the world. It comes with an electronic ink display that reads like real paper, with no glare, even in bright daylight and it offers the convenience of downloading books in less than 60 seconds. Kindle is so small and light that it disappears in your hands, which is just what you want when you are reading a great story like ‘El puente de los asesinos,’ by Arturo Pérez-Reverte.”

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In a press release I received this morning,  Amazon announced the launch of their latest “local” online ebook store, the Italian Kindle Store.

This is exciting news for all Italians who want the joys of using a Kindle for their ereading, and want ebooks in Italian.   They can now buy the latest Kindle, the Kindle 4 that will be set up to work in Italian and have all the advantages that other nation’s Kindle owners already have…. All except the free 3G bit, for that they will have to wait a bit until the touch screen Kindle comes to Italy in due time.

This is really good news for consumers in Italy, not sure if it is such good news for other ebook sellers there though, Amazon is a large and heavy duty competitor, and totally ruthless as well.   We shall see.

But, in the mean time, here is a quote from Amazon’s press release that gives an idea of the sort of ebooks that you lucky Italians will be able to buy from Amazon:

“We are excited to introduce the new Italian Kindle Store with the largest digital selection of Italian-language titles to millions of Amazon.it customers today. Italian customers are passionate about books and reading and we believe they will love reading great Italian books like Roberto Saviano’s ‘Gomorra,’ Tiziano Terzani’s ‘Un indovino mi disse’ and current best sellers like the new Steve Jobs biography on Kindle,” said Diego Piacentini, senior vice president, Amazon.com. “Kindle is already the best-selling e-reader in the world. It comes with an electronic ink display that reads like real paper, with no glare, even in bright daylight and it offers the convenience of downloading books in less than 60 seconds. Kindle is so small and light that it disappears in your hands, which is great when you are looking for a story in which you can get lost in the author’s words like Umberto Eco’s ‘Il Cimitero di Praga.’”

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