For a kid, the period between Thanksgiving and Christmas has to be the most excruciatingly slow time of year. It’s a never-ending wait to see what toys will be you under the tree come Christmas morning. When I was little, I would spend this time making wish lists and browsing through the toy pages of the store catalogs. I’d revise my list again and again in hopes of getting the perfect mix of loot.

Now as an adult, I remember those in-between days fondly. Like many things in life, I know that anticipation is equal to, if not greater than, the event itself. As a parent I also now realize how impractical my vast Christmas wish lists were. I wanted so many different things that a certain degree of disappointment was inevitable on Dec. 25. There were always things on those lists that were left unfulfilled.

Christopher Tupa remembers those days as well. The artist and toy collector has created a book of toys and collectibles he wanted as a child but was never able to receive. His free ebook can be downloaded from his website.
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Brave is a rather brave venture for Pixar. It’s the company’s first female lead, but more importantly, Pixar is coming off the lackluster Cars 2, a movie so bad I couldn’t finish watching it and my four-year old has never requested it again. So far the gamble seems to be paying off as audiences are embracing the firey-haired Merida and the story of her struggle for independence. If you’re one of the millions who have already seen the movie, you can relive the adventure at home as a Disney ebook, and also as a motion comic, both available for iOS.

If you’ve read my reviews of Disney ebooks before, you’ll know that Disney does a pretty decent job of getting and keeping kids’ interest through the use of quality artwork, good music and sound effects, and interesting animations. Brave is no exception. In fact, in a lot of ways, Brave exceeds any previous efforts I’ve seen from Disney’s ebooks.

First, the artwork is absolutely stunning throughout. I said before with The Jungle Book that many of the “pages” were screen-capture worthy. With Brave, nearly every page would make a great background for your iPad. Read More

Disney has always been a home for great stories. Every decade since the 1930s, when Disney’s first feature animation, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, debuted, has seen its share of classic films, including 1967’s The Jungle Book and 1970’s Aristocats. Today our kids have grown up on DVD and Blu-ray copies of these films, but now they can also marvel at the same stories told in a new way – interactive e-books on the iPad and iPhone.

Plot

Both books follow the storyline of the movies quite well. They cut the parts that are a bit superfluous, but keep in the important plot points so that the story continues to make sense. If your kids are fans of the movies, they’ll have no problem following along with the e-books.
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Geek confession: I haven’t read the Harry Potter books. I’m about halfway through the first. I wasn’t into Harry Potter until recently, and I don’t read as much as I should. Don’t worry, the HP books are coming out as ebooks for the first time this month right? Oh, wait.

JK Rowling’s weird new digital piggy bank called Pottermore was supposed to offer the ebooks this month, but on the official Pottermore Insider blog, they said:

Finally, the Pottermore Shop, which will sell the Harry Potter eBooks and digital audio books, will now open in the first half of 2012, in order to allow us to focus on our first priority: opening Pottermore to as many people as possible and making the experience as good as it can be.

First half of 2012? That’s like a million years away! Won’t we all be too busy playing our Wii U’s, driving jetpacks, and wearing V-Striped Jumpsuits by then? Who knows. But seriously, how hard is it to release some text files on the Kindle store so I can replace my illegal versions buy them and make JK Rowling more money?

I can understand a movie or a video game getting delayed, but something that should have happened years ago is hard to excuse, especially when you know it would take them about five minutes to export their text files in the proper formats.

I guess I’ll wait a while longer to read the Harry Potter books, because well, I’m lazy.