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March 25, 2008
Lookybook: eBook picture books
Apparently many bibliobloggers got the same email I did announcing Lookybook, an eBook site in beta. It is an eBook site dedicated to children's picture books. There are not many eBook sites out there for children, so this one is a real find. There are 200+ titles currently, with a goal to have over 1,000 by mid-2008.
Users can register for free and create their own bookshelves, leave and read others' reviews and ratings, share favorite books via other applications (like Facebook, del.icio.us, digg, and StumbleUpon), email links to favorite books to friends, and more. You don't have to be registered to read the books, though.
New books are featured on the homepage as is the BookTumbler - a random book selector. You can search for books or browse by author, title, genre, or subject. Above is a really cute book I found via a subject browse for "cats" (but of course).
Another neat feature is that any one any published author can submit a book to Lookybook, so any picture book authors and artists out there can get their book ePublished.
There are of course links to buy the books, which is why the site is free, I suppose. Books are marked as copyrighted material, and the resolution of the pages is so small as to make pilfering unlikely. That small resolution is one of my only two suggestions for the site. In some of the books the small size made the text nearly impossible to read, and for children who are used to large text it would probably be unreadable. The second issue is that there are no indications how many pages there are in the books, or where you are in the book itself. So you don't know if you're halfway done or near the end (important factors in selecting and continuing stories with sleepy kids).
All in all, though, it's a great site and easy to use. I can see huge applications of this for parents - I have several friends with small children who use their laptops for bedtime stories via eBooks. This site is free - which is great! Why not hold an eBook storytime at your library? The size of the books' on the webpages may be an issue, as I mention above, so try it out first to see if it would work.
March 25, 2008 | Permalink
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Comments
Have you seen http://www.biguniverse.com/? This blows away Lookybook in some ways.
Posted by: | April13, 2008
Thanks for the clarification Andy. I had misread their materials they sent me as meaning "anybody." I have corrected the post to be clearer too.
Posted by: Sarah Houghton-Jan (LiB) | March26, 2008
At this time they aren't accepting submissions from self-published authors/illustrators; just folks who are already in print.
Nice site, though. Good UI.
Posted by: Andy Havens | March26, 2008
Umm, yess, but BookFLIX costs money and this site is free. I was able to read every book I tried except for a few specific pages. I don't think it's an overarching problem that text is unreadable - it is only in a few places. Having the page images be bigger in general would be nice, not only for ease of reading text, but for the illustrations as well. The images are small, I'm sure, for copyright reasons - the publishers probably figure that smaller images mean less copyright violations.
Posted by: Sarah Houghton-Jan (LiB) | March26, 2008
The small resolution is a very BIG problem! I was going to send the link to our children's department manager, but wanted to take a look first. I couldn't read anything! This is a great idea, but the execution needs considerable work. As an alternative, I'd recommend the new service we recently acquired from Scholastic called BookFLIX. Children can read along and/or listen as the book is read. And we make it available free of charge through our website.
Posted by: Janet | March26, 2008
