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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Just a small taster to give you an idea of what we shall soon have in our ereaders

In a couple of earlier posts I discussed this newest screen technology from Qualcomm, which goes under the name of Mirasol. An intriguing system akin to e-Ink that can give us loads of rich colours on our ereaders, without the problems associated with the LCD screens that all previous mobile devices (iPads, Tablets, Smart Phones laptops and all earlier colour ereaders) use.

Since when, a new short promo video of the South Korean ereader has been released which gives in a matter of a few sentences a very good overview of what this screen (and ereader) are capable of.  Quite impressive for a non backlit LCD screen I would say.  Basically what they have created is a small tablet that can be used comfortably in bright light and with a long battery endurance.

So I am certain that this screen technology will very rapidly start to appear in all manner of other mobile devices.

Anyhow, here is that short video, sit back and enjoy it.

Links to previous posts on this topic:

mirasol-coloured-ereader-screen-has-arrived-kyobo-launch-ereader-with-full-colour-e-ink-like-technology/

qualcomm-promise-ereaders-with-full-colour-and-long-battery-life-by-mid-2012/

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OK, colour screen for ereaders, interesting, needed or pointless?   What do you think?

Yesterday I wrote a post about the rumour that Qualcomm’ Mirasol screen technology would be launched some time in 2012.  And I expressed doubts about whether it would ever actually happen.

Well, I was as wrong as you can be!  Shortly after posting that article, I was inundated with press releases telling me that Korean book sellers Kyobo have launched an ereader using the Mirasol screen.

So, with a very red face, sack-cloth and ashes, I have to tell you that it has actually happened, and there is now a fully fledged ereader out there with all the advantages of the standard e-Ink type of screen (long battery life, easy to read in bright light, easy on the eyes for long periods of reading), but also full colour.

It seems the refresh rate is fast enough to also show videos on this device, so whilst it is a dedicated ereader, and not simply a small tablet, it can perform several other tasks.

They haven’t yet given out too much information about this ereader, but it will only be on sale in South Korea, that is obvious at least.   But equally obvious, if it takes off, then it wont be long before other ereader companies come on board and start to use the Mirasol screen instead of the e-Ink or LCD ones they currently use.    So watch out for the first non-LCD colour Nook or Kobo ereader…  Must happen.

So, until then, here are a few extracts from their press release which give an idea of what this gadget is.  Also, if you follow this link, you will be able to see a couple of videos showing the ereader in action, rather impressive I find.

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The much trumpeted Harry Potter Website has had to announce a serious delay in its plans to start selling all the Hogwarts books as ebooks.

The idea was that they would start selling the Harry Potter books online as ebooks this month (October 2011), but apparently owing to a combination of several million frenzied kids playing away at some form of Wizard’s fencing online game on the Pottermore site and other unspecified problems, they have announced that they will start selling those ebooks sometime next year.

Many commentators have pointed out that this means they will miss the Christmas shopping frenzy, but it has also been pointed out that they don’t really need to give a damn about this, as they have already made more money than one would think possible from those books.

As a spokeperson for Pottermore puts it:

(we)are in no rush to launch anything until all potential problems have been sorted out. . A delayed launch may even mean a greater second wave of excitement about the ebooks becoming available as the anticipation builds up over a longer period of time.”

However, one thing they may have overlooked here is that in setting up this website with lots of trumpets and drums, they have pulled Harry Potter fans onto the net, and will certainly have thus caused many of them to realize that they can download any or all the Harry Potter books in ebook format from no end of free (illegal) torrent sites, which must effect sales when finally Pottermore get themselves together enough to actually open shop.

Link to Pottermore: http://www.pottermore.com/

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So, what do you think about not being able to (legally) get hold of Harry Potter books as ebooks?

Post written by Guest Writer Lizzy Ford:

From Rejection to Sales: This Guerrilla Writer’s Tale

Like many indie writers, I tried on and off for about ten years to gain the attention and interest of an agent or publisher.  I had a few false starts and a whole lot of ignored query letters after years of grueling work.  Thoroughly depressed, I almost gave up on writing and began to doubt I ever had an ounce of talent in me.  My husband is the I.T. brawn of the family who had been following technological development in the book arena, and suggested I try e-publishing this past December.  Going in, I wasn’t really sure how things would turn out, because I’d been programmed to believe that writers forced to invest in themselves are writers who weren’t good enough for a publisher to invest in them.

We studied what most successful writers have in common, identified two common themes (multiple titles and an extensive fan base) and used those to tailor a marketing plan that I’ve been told multiple times was nothing short of madness.  The plan had two goals:

1.  Focus on exposure – not sales – for 2011.
2.  Make December 2011 the month when it all comes together.

I’m a fanatic writer, and I can write 30-60,000 words a month.  I also had a list of about 65 projects I wanted to write, of which about 3 were completed and about 30 were in various stages of writing.  So we decided to do what no one else had done yet: write as many books as I could this year and release them all for free in order to build a back list and fan base in the shortest amount of time possible.  By the end of December, we’ll have released 10 books this year.  We’ve been operating under the assumption that any sales we get before December are luck – they’re not part of the plan!  In December, we monetize our operations.

My December target: sell 10,000 books.

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