There is much content on LINGQ. A great deal of it is beginners’ stuff and material for semi-advanced learners. And there is a lot of interesting content for advanced students, but …. what I miss is a collection of modern literature and other modern publications. Much of this modern material is available in digital form. I can of course buy an ebook, remove the DRM, convert the text to a format that LINGQ accepts and import it. This asks a certain degree of skill in the technique in the digital area which not everyone disposes of. So my suggestion is: LINGQ, open an ebookshop and allow us to buy ebooks from you and to receive them directly in the LINGQ-format under “my lessons”. This would be an enormous help for us, language students, and it would be a huge increase of the content available on LINGQ!
I concur with this suggestion. From a convenience standpoint, it is unquestionably easier and more user-friendly to hop on LingQ when I’m on the train or in the car and read/ listen to an ebook that is formatted just like the podcasts. Right now, if I want to read/listen to an ebook on LingQ I would have to import the text on LingQ and then listen to the book on Audible.com while reading. This is very easy to do if I was on a computer, but like I mentioned earlier, if I was on my phone and find myself with 20 minutes of downtime it would be a bit more difficult. Not to mention the financial benefits this would have for LingQ, if we had to purchase the ebooks.
We would love to do this too and are going to be reaching out to publishers to try and figure out how we could make this happen. Give us some time. We are going to be adding to our Premium content and making it more prominent as well so it is easier to find. Some kind of Ebookshop as you are suggesting.
Project Gutenberg would be a ready resource for this. They have large collections of books in many languages: Browse By Language: English | Project Gutenberg.
Audio versions are not available in most cases but still it would be nice to have the text.
And, in the meantime, anyone can grab a book they like on Gutenberg, select-all, and paste it into the importer in LingQ. Instant LingQ ebook.
Gutenberg has much interesting material which can be downloaded free. But it has mainly old content, The ebookshop I’d like to see on LINGQ would sell modern books.
I would also like to know what literature is popular in my target language, which at this time is French. I can see an ebookshop helping with this.
I guess this is not easy regarding the right holders (authors, publishers) and their contracts. I simply buy the books in a regular ebook shop and import them on my own.
For German I’ve created a list with recommended books on my blog.
Of course, an ebook shop on LINGQ could exist only with permission and cooperation of the publishers. When I buy ebooks, I can read them on my ereader or on my iPad. But if I want to import them in LINGQ, I must remove the DRM, which I don’t find an easy thing to do. I am now spending time on taking screenshots of each page of an Italian novel with my iPad. I send the images to my email-account, place them from my email-account in a folder on my computer, use an OCR-site to convert the image of the text to WORD, and then I can import the text into LINGQ. A time-consuming process!
There are more and more shops which offers ebooks without hard DRM. I guess it would be difficult for LingQ to contracts with publishers in different countries. I guess this is not easy. And if they use hard DRM they would expect that LingQ does this as well. I do not see how LingQ could do this.
I think the idea is nice, but difficult to realize. There are so many publishers … And you would have to make a contract with each of them.
Let’s just see at first if some publishers or authors would allow their works to be sold on LingQ so that we can import the text. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are some authors of interesting books, that would be not only willing, but pleased that their works can be sold and used in this way. Great idea!
louise_steele, I assume that you’re Canadian so in the meantime maybe you can check out the very obvious www.amazon.ca or www.renaud-bray.com.
Thanks, I will check those out.
I would buy books on LingQ for sure!
Movies and TV series with LingQable subtitles would make Steve and Mark into billionaires. I know of one extremely successful and extremely illegal Russian site that shows American and British TV series and movies with subtitles in English. The site allows individual words in the subtitles to be clicked and saved, in much the same fashion as in texts on Lingq, for flashcard review.
Getting the audio with the majority of books would be a major bonus. The are several books in French I would like to read, but it’s not worth tackling them yet as I still really need the audio. Even in Russian, I’d much rather read history by Khlevniuk than Akunin, but there is audio available for Akunin’s books.