EReadbook: last couple days of free shipping AND Happy Sharing program!

Well, today we got our Ereadbook Touch pen and books… so very exciting. They arrived super quick from Ontario (ordered Monday afternoon and arrived Wed by 12:30 noon!), in perfect condition. All files for the books I ordered already loaded on the pen, so we were good to go upon opening the box.

And it was a much bigger box than I expected. Just the Starter Set has enough in it to keep you busy for weeks. I thought it might be very little material without getting the extra books in the Packages, but the six books that come with the pen have all sorts of things, from games to stories. And the other books that we got with it (Classic Fairy Tales, 600 Words, English Chinese dictionary… which is hardcover btw) are all wonderful. The pen can “speak” for about 6 hours before needing recharging. Recharging is done via the USB cable, that plugs into a regular AC adapter that goes into a wall socket. A neck lanyard keeps the pen around your kid’s neck. It shuts off by itself after giving several verbal cues that you are leaving it unattended!

Right now Bigreach.ca is offering free shipping within Canada until Feb 28, for the Chinese Spring Festival (includes Chinese New Years). I think it is definitely taking advantage of, as the starter box is quite bulky and heavy. They sent it by expedited, and I needed to sign for it.

If you do order the pen, either this week or later, you can say that you were refered by me, Leanne, and that my pen ID # is E2003-132067. Email your order to “order@bigreach.ca”

They have a “Happy Sharing Program” (Word .doc) to encourage people to refer their friends (and complete strangers!)… give the pen ID of the person who referred you and when you buy a pen and register it for warranty, you will get $10 credit off your next regular priced books, and the person referring you will also get $10 credit off THEIR next regular priced books. Win-Win. Here is the price list and package descriptions

Anyways, my son likes it and wants to actually listen to Chinese in books for once, and I like it in that it really helps my listening skills in Chinese. The book’s various segments (illustrations, pinyin, chinese characters) speak with a variety of male, female and children’s voices, and say things from short and cute to complicated. One can listen to a single phrase many times over to help with listening comprehension and reading help. I think that one of the major uses for me will be to increase my reading-out-loud skills, that I can transfer to our other non-talking Chinese picture books.

And already, just reading “Xiao Hong Mao” (Little Red Ridinghood), I have picked up vocabulary, syntax and phrases I can use to play with my son!

I will try to get a proper photo-post done to show the whole pen set and books in the near future. For now, I recommend it.

eReadbook Audio Pen Canadian Update!

Starter Kit Audio Book 1

Well, I got several informative email responses today from Emily, at eReadbook’s Canadian distributor, BigReach.ca. (See previous Post on Chinese English Audio Pen and books)

Turns out that:

• They have FREE SHIPPING WITHIN CANADA from February 1-28 for Chinese Spring Festival
• Don’t worry if you have a Mac: The pen itself can be loaded with the audio from the cds that come with the books by putting the cds in your computer and plugging the pen in via USB: no installation of software is required for this
• If you are worried about doing it (what with a whole load of Chinese instructions and if you have a Mac like me) they will gladly load the audio for the books you have ordered onto the pen you order at the same time before sending your order to you, as a customer service
• They are VERY helpful on the phone or email
• They have a starter set that includes the pen, the starter set of 8 books, the Happy Touch Reading Board (I have no idea what this does, and if it needs a PC to make it work, but it has an audio file of over 100M), 8 Touch Reading Cards for Children Radio Drama: Journey to the West (this is the classic Monkey King story), MP3 Player Card and Recording-Comparing Card, USB Cable and Charger, and a cord that attaches to the pen so it won’t fall to the floor.

Starter Kit Audio Book 3

There are many other Packages available at 20-30% off.

If you wish to see the pricing, I am not sure that I am allowed to post it here, since it is not right now online at their site, but just email Emily at order @ bigreach.ca and say that you saw the pen and books on this blog, and I imagine she will send you the whole list of Starter Kit and various packages and pricing that she sent me.

What with free shipping to Canada now, it is a good time to buy if you are seriously interested.

eReadbook Touch-Reading Pen

When I was in Beijing in fall 2007, during my adoption trip to bring Big Boy home, I went into a large foreign language bookstore (which meant most books were in English!) and saw a funky electronic audio pen and books that it could read. Seeing as how at that point my knowledge of chinese was extremely limited, and I knew so few characters, AND I wanted to keep my son’s heritage language, I was quite interested. To have books in Chinese, with a wee pen that could read them out loud with proper pronunciation… what a great thing! I could learn pronunciation, he could associate sounds with characters, pinyin and images.

Ereadbook Monkey King 1

But you know how it is when you are traveling (or just shopping)… you think “that is cool, but a bit expensive. Do I really need it?” and think, “Well, I can always get it another time”.

Do NOT do this. I did this in Europe when I did a backpacking trip in 1981, and still regret not buying those soft grey suede slump boots. I thought, yeah, they’ll be EVERYWHERE in Canada in a year or two, after all they’re EVERYWHERE here now in Europe. Nah. Never happened. And they were sweet: soft, comfortable, attractive… sigh. And that was nearly 30 yrs ago!

So, did I learn my lesson? No. I went back nearly a week later, to that Beijing bookstore, and the display was taken down. I tried to explain to the staff in broken Chinese, and their broken English, what had been there (several women demonstrating, a huge table of books and pens)… they finally found ONE staff member who unlocked a wee door behind a cupboard, and found one demo pen with no price or instructions… they were like “well, um, yeah, those people aren’t working today, we’re sure to have them someplace…”… Well, I was over the Pacific ocean that time the next day. So it didn’t happen.

eReadbook The Piglet goes to School

Now, more than two years later, I saw on a chinese forum that someone was looking for a Leapfrog-like audiopen reading system for Chinese, and just couldn’t let it go. Much googling later, I came across this Human Pen (it seems to be a transliteration of their Chinese name: Hongwen?) and I was all excited. But they are only available in China. They were very nice and offered to ship the books and pen for about $120 (shipping only), but even my most splurgeriffic self couldn’t justify that.

And then I made a wonderful discovery at Amazon.com (yes, home of lost and forgotten items)… eReadbook. THIRTY TWO eReadbook items! A whole slew of inexpensive books (think set of 3 full color audio-enabled books for $13.99) and strangely, on offer only one pen in stock (out of three stores offering said books).

eReadbook Pen in box

And of course, Amazon.com and its cohorts will only ship books, cds and dvds to Canada. No toys nor other items. And apparently audio-enabled books with cds in them, despite being only books and cds, are TOYS and thus ineligible to be shipped to Canada. So the search was on.

I followed up the books’ amazing “trial pages” and “preview pages” to e-readbook.com but it is pretty much all chinese. Then I ended up at ereadbook.us, which sounded more promising. (Caution: every page on the .us site has a video ad that loads before you can see anything else=timeconsuming). Phoning them got someone who could SORT of speak SOME English… well, enough to say they can’t speak English, and gave me the cell phone # of someone who could. And SHE did answer the phone, in fluent English, while driving: “whomever gave you my cell phone #?!!” I think she stayed on the road, at least long enough to give me the Canadian distributor.

eReadbook Early Learning cards: home

Oh, those words are like angels singing in my ears. CANADIAN DISTRIBUTOR! So, I present to you, after much research, the website of BigReach.ca. I suppose that means to reach high or somesuch? Don’t you just love English spoken by semi-fluent allophones? Thank god I don’t make up bad chinese-sounding urls… like um, “Wenjonggal”!! (yeah it comes from Zhong Wen= Chinese) LOL!

Anyways, do go check it out. If you are American, check out the Amazon.com eReadbook offerings… the prices are MUCH lower. The pen itself is $98 US plus shipping but once you have that… it holds 2G, you can upload the audio files and read the books, which mostly come in sets and are really reasonably priced.

eReadbook Touch-Reading Pen

If you are Canadian, go to the BigReach.ca site. Especially check out the Bilingual Early Learning section. Watch the videos on how the books work by clicking on the book titles, and also click on the book covers to get a flash sample of the book pages sans audio. Look through the Audio-book Library for a nice selection of books in Chinese. Some are very simple with one or two phrases per page and others are long chapterbooks or graphic novels.

Check out the Try Me! in the Audio Reading-Pen section… click not only on the English, characters and pinyin, but also the images for sounds, whole sentences and word pronunciations.

To buy in Canada, most stores seem to be in the Toronto region, but apparently one can also use Paypal to order by email… here is Where to Buy.

Now if they would only put their FAQ section in English, same with the User Manual and Upgrade information, as well as their Special Offers, it would be great. AND someplace put down their pricing for the actual pen and shipping. Please please put pricing for the PEN!

The books all have pricing in the details… again the prices are reasonable: often $30 for 6 books, $50 for 8 books etc… not as cheap as Amazon.com but in a world where a single French book can set you back $15-$30 easily we shan’t quibble.

And finally, I wish it was mac compatible: the pen runs on mp

eReadbook "English" (bilingual) dictionary

3s which are uploaded via USB, but appears to be Windows/Vista on PC… I guess I could live with using someone else’s computer to download 2G of audio and then just use the pen as is. The pen recharger seems to be AC, and not chargeable by USB only as is my iPod (which gets used almost never as it is always dead when I wish to use it) (*update, one can drag and drop the audio files on a mac, or, as I did, get the people at bigreach.ca to upload the files for the books you are buying onto the pen before they ship it to you)

eReadbook Fruit and Veg wall poster

Anyways, I hope you are as excited as I am! If anyone runs out and gets this, tell me how it went (the buying/shipping/customer service part) and how you find the actual products’ performance. We are DYING to know!

*click on all images in this post to go to book details.

*Update: we bought it and we love it! If you do order the pen, either this week or later, you can say that you were referred by me, Leanne at wenjonggal.wordpress.com, and that my pen ID # is E2003-132067. Email your order to order@bigreach.ca

They have a Happy Sharing Program (Word .doc) to encourage people to refer their friends (and complete strangers!) give the pen ID of the person who referred you and when you buy a pen and register it for warranty, you will get $10 credit off your next regular priced books, and the person referring you will also get $10 credit off THEIR next regular priced books. Win-Win. Here is the price list and package descriptions

eReadbook Find a good Friend

eReadbook 3 Kingdoms in Cartoons

eReadbook 600 Necessary Words age3-4

New “astore”

Well, we are in bed with the devil! I have made an “astore” of books, dvds and cds that we like and use, which is over there in the right hand menu under “All Our Fave Books”. Of course it is not ALL our fave books, but rather the ones available at Amazon.com. But I had to find some way for the “link category” to start with something alphabetical proceeding “Blogroll”, as this wordpress.com thingie doesn’t allow for manual ordering of “categories” over there.

And I DID try to imbed the astore into a page, like the “About” page, up there on the top menu, but for whatever unknown reason, anytime I pasted the iframe html into the “html” new page editing window, and saved it, WordPress just “disappeared” it all, and said “0 words”. So incredibly frustrating.

Anyways, do go and check out what we recommend in the way of adult and children’s chinese learning materials. It will be like coming home with us and browsing through our bookshelves!

I’ll try to get around to updating it soon.

And if you dislike Amazon, you can check out Childbook.com. They are good people, and my fave chinese learning materials store.