Books

Homeschooling in the Philippines: how we read children’s ebooks online for free

20 February 2020 1 Comment

This post is part of my series on homeschooling. Click here to read more.

BABYBUG (March 2015) by Cricket Media — Screenshot of a spread from an issue of BABYBUG children’s magazine

My husband and I read picture books to our toddler everyday. It’s an enjoyable bonding activity, and many studies have shown the numerous benefits of reading aloud to children.

When our child was around 9 months old, my husband bought around three dozen used board books from Half Price Books and shipped them from the US in a balikbayan box, along with other baby stuff. We also ordered around a dozen board books in Filipino online from Adarna House and Pumplepie Books & Happiness. We thought these were plenty enough, but eventually we found it monotonous to read the same books over and over again. We’ve practically memorized all of her board books, which include classics like Goodnight Moon.

Now, it would be quite expensive to buy a new picture book every day, even if from a local used bookstore like Booksale. Besides, we find their board book selection for preschoolers to be quite meager — most of Booksale’s children’s books are for school-age kids.

I enviously look back at the time when I visited my cousin in the US years ago, and we went to her local public library. She borrowed tons of children’s books — as much as she could fill her large tote bag — for my young nephew, all for free.

Unfortunately, libraries here in the Philippines aren’t as impressive. Luckily, my husband’s US library card is still active. Searching his local library’s catalog online, I found that they have many picture books available as ebooks. They also have digital subscriptions to magazines tailored for toddlers like BABYBUG and Hello. We borrowed some issues on our iPad mini with their app, and we’re loving it so far. I was afraid the text would be too small on an iPad mini, but they’re quite legible.

Hello (March 2020) by Highlights for Children — Screenshot of a spread from an issue of Hello children’s magazine

Obviously, the tactile experience of reading on a tablet isn’t the same as holding an actual board book, but the price of zero can’t be beat. After rereading the same picture books for months, my husband and I can’t help but be excited at the prospect of reading a new story every day.

We are not one of those #ZeroGadget parents. We believe mobile devices are helpful if used wisely. We only read together up to about 45 minutes on the iPad. I will write more about our screen time policies in another post.

If you have close friends and family in the US (or other countries with good public libraries that have extensive digital catalogs), do ask them if they could share their library card with you.

About book blog tours: guest author posts that work for me

16 July 2012 Leave a Comment

This is old, but from kt literary (via bookshelves of doom):

What ARE the options for the, let’s call it as it may be, midlist author who may not get sent on tour by her publisher, and isn’t going to get the exclusive cover reveal or interview on the big entertainment sites? Blog tours are popular because they are free for everyone involved, minus only the cost of a few review copies, and sometimes not even that. But do they work? If you’re an avid reader of a certain blog, does a guest post by an author make you check them out, or do you skip them, to hear more from the bloggers you came to the site to read?

I’m always looking for good books to read, so I follow a couple of book blogs on Google Reader. However, I almost always skip blog tour posts. In the same way that I’ve developed ad blindness to web banners, I’ve developed “book blog tour blindness”. Their contests don’t entice me either, as most prizes are dead-tree versions (I don’t read novels in paper anymore). Even if they do give away free ebooks, most are still US-only.

So how can an author reach a reader like me, for whom blog tours are mostly noise?

Write a guest review, for one thing.

I follow book blogs mainly for book reviews and recommendations. Over time, I’ve had to unsubscribe from several because they had too much non-rec stuff going on. But if the guest post were also a review, then I’m not likely to skip it, especially if it’s a well-written one of a fairly interesting book. The author can then promote his/her own book with a short description at the end in the author info section.

Trust me, I’m more likely to click the link to Amazon or wherever this way. On Goodreads, I’ve discovered a few authors through their insightful reviews of their favorite books. I figure that if I like books they also like, then perhaps I might just like the books they wrote themselves.

Author Maureen Johnson wrote about turning down blog tour requests, saying, “because I’m writing on the same subject (ME! MY BOOK!) the pieces are going to get VERY REPETITIVE AND BORING.” But this way, the reader doesn’t get noise, the host blog gets quality content that brings traffic, and the guest author gets to write about a different subject, presumably about a book s/he likes, on top of promoting his/her own book in a non-spammy-ish way. It’s a win-win-win for everyone.

Hysteria trailer

21 August 2011 Leave a Comment

This is interesting:

(via Smart Bitches, Trashy Books)

If you’re thinking this is an outlandish piece of fiction conjured by some perverted male mind, think again. I read an interesting book concerning the same topic last year: The Technology of Orgasm: “Hysteria,” the Vibrator, and Women’s Sexual Satisfaction (Johns Hopkins Studies in the History of Technology) by Rachel P Maines (via Promantica). Very well-researched and informative, and quite readable for an academic work. The lengths people went not to acknowledge that hey, women could get horny, too. Truth really is stranger than fiction.