etoy Books

For my daughter's first birthday, I wrote and illustrated a story for her about the day she was born. I'm no artist, mind you, but she loves it. (If you want to, I believe you can use the computer to make very simple sticker-like illustrations instead of drawing.) It was especially meaningful to her when her baby sister was born this last year. I am buying a new one for the little sister as well. I think it's a terrific idea for making a personalized keepsake FOR your child or grandchild.

The only drawback, you do have to be a little creative regarding the words per page limit.

This is such a great item and worth every penny. We'd love to do these every year and get duplicate copies for our families. This is a great way to capture the different stages of creativity in your children - and rewarding to them when they see their story "published" in a real book. Highly recommended for all ages!

I bought this book for my grandughter that is 10 years old and loves to write stores. It was a wise pick for me , as it is right at her age level. Easy to understand , Easy to follow directions . For any child that loves to write stores, or to encourage a child to write it is a great book.

Got this for my 6-yr old daughter's birthday. It was easy for us to do together. The great fun was getting the completed, hard-bound book back in the mail! She was so proud to be an author! She even took it to school to show her class. It's a great gift & a great keepsake.

We bought the first of these for our son when he was 3 1/2 and helped him create his first book. He loved it and would read it to us daily. He's five now and has 'created' 5 additional books (this time without our help). He loves this and has decided that he's going to become a writer when he grows up (after he becomes a pilot). As a result of creating the ILLUSTORY books, he's started keeping a journal (which we thought was a big endeavor for a 5 year old- but he's managing to write in it every day about the perils of kindergarten, of course!) Kudos to the makers of this product for keeping children educationally entertained!!

This wonderful little toy is my sons favorite! His love for Clifford began with the TV show, that I just happened upon one day and it really caught his attention. I then found a large stuffed Clifford for him. But this small toy he really loves. He sleeps with Clifford and takes him everywhere he goes. My son is 9 months and is into biting everything. So I do recommend if your child is at that same stage you may want to purchase more than one so you can change out between cleanings.

This delightful stuffed toy is my 2-yr-old grandson's favorite! As we read the Clifford books, his very own Clifford snuggles with us! This small toy rides in the car seat, sleeps next to him, and has reinforced his love of the book series as well. The books are a source of good "life lessons", they are colorfully illustrated, and the stuffed toy brings the one-dimensional character we all know and love close enough to snuggle!

I'm going to be completely honest with you -
I only picked up this book because I was bored, and it was the only thing I hadn't read at my local library.
I LOVED IT.
The entire idea of etoy was incredible, and I really enjoyed this book.
And I'm not really into electronics and stuff.
Like, AT ALL.
So go read it. Now.

"Leaving Reality Behind.." is a myopic and biased account of a subject that just isn't that interesting. Unless you were one of the eToys.com employees or one of the 'cutting-edge European artists' of etoy, the 'Toywar' was quite simply a non-event for the rest of the planet. In essence, the authors (who clearly are sided and likely involved with the etoy camp) are trying to dress up a relatively trivial legal dispute over a domain name that is now about three years old. Why is this interesting?? Throw another 'yet-another-dotcom-story' on the pile.

In years to come when they're teaching the history of the internet in all its aspects at colleges this book will be one of a hand-full of books that will be essential reading.

There have been lots of "I was there" internet books - some early ones like "Burn Rate" were truly excellent accounts of life at the coal face but more recent titles such as "Dot.bomb" were dull reads that neither entertained nor informed. "Leaving Reality Behind" is different in that neither of the authors are telling their own story but rather reporting back on the events that helped define and shape the evolution of this internet thing. Both funny and intelligent this book stands out for the thoroughness of its research (in the rush to get them out many internet books have suffered from sloppy editing and factual inaccuracies) as is witnessed by its excellent bibliography - probably worth the cover price alone for anyone serious about understanding recent digital history.

Finally, in bringing together the European and American sides of the story there are deep insites offered in the differences and similarities that bind the two continents together - particularly pertinent at the moment.

There was a time when people were just starting e-mail and the World Wide Web, and had no real idea what sort of life the internet was going to bring forth. In the early 1990s, there weren't many rules, and commercial use of the Web had not taken it over. In 1995, an anarchic group of seven Swiss artists started the site www.etoy.com. In 1997, a billion-dollar firm to sell toys via the internet started up, registering as www.etoys.com. Two years later, eToys sued etoy for damaging the eToys trademark. The resulting fracas is told in an entertaining story that is not just a dot-com bust parable, _Leaving Reality Behind: etoy vs eToys.com & Other Battles to Control Cyberspace_ (Ecco) by Adam Wishart and Regula Bochsler. The earnestness and foolishness and greed herein described are universal; the contemporary surroundings of this tale, however, have much to tell us about the founding philosophy of the internet and its commercial future.

The artists involved in etoy had worked on collaborative digital art projects, and developed their site as a parody of internet business. They issued shares, and strangely, the share certificates were art works on their own; etoy did not manufacture toys or anything, but it did sell shares, and the shares (or art) did sell. They mocked executive appearances, adopting orange flight jackets, black pants, and shaved heads as uniforms. They intended to be "the First Street Gang of the Information Super Data Highway." Official company communications were signed, "etoy, leaving reality behind." Of course, commercial dot-coms were leaving reality behind in their own fashion. The story of eToys is told just as fully in this book as that of etoy, and it is just as strange. eToys was one of the first companies that emerged from idealab!, a business that was going to produce businesses just like McDonald produced hamburgers. eToys was supposed to beat Toys-R-Us by making it easy to shop without the brats. In 1999, the all important Initial Public Offering of eToys stock was made, amid furious excitement built up over the previous months, but eToys was in big trouble. That didn't stop it from trying to crush the annoying etoy gang. Even after a judge granted an injunction to shut down etoy, etoy wasn't weren't going to give in, and netizens all over began a "Toywar" to "Save etoy now!" A year after doing all the bullying, eToys was bankrupt.

Wishart and Bochsler not only have written a fun and rather exciting tale full of interesting characters, but they have also given a capsule history of the internet. There are detours here to explain the origins of the Web itself, and how different coding standards were developed to tie all our computers together. The first search engines are here, and the mechanics of the organizations who are supposed to control web names. This is an amusing story, and the book will be an excellent reference for those in the future who want to understand what the beginning internet was like and what the dot-com boom-and-bust was all about.

As an MBA student and a former internet person, I can say with great authority that most business books are the driest, most soul-destroying texts on earth. This book, however, defies the odds and is truly compelling -- so much so that you can forget you're reading about a corporate legal battle and instead feel like you're following an Epic Drama of Good versus Evil.

Actually, that's not quite true. This book reads more like a comedy than anything (laugh-out-loud funny), yet it also intelligently examines the more serious issues behind this bizarre tussle between art and (e-)commerce in a way that has yet to be topped. It actually attempts to avoid taking sides as well, though you cannot help rooting for the artists in the end because they are just more charming.

A great and interesting read, and a must-read for anyone who had a pulse during the internet boom years.

The humor in the book comes in large part to the insane antics of the etoy crew, crazy Swiss conceptual techo performance artists who provide ample fodder for laughs throughout the book. Orange jumpsuits? Check. Mirrored sunglasses? Check. Shaved heads? Check? Earnest 'etoy offsite meetings' in random Eastern European motels? Check. Contrast them with the comparatively dopey Lenk and his team's inability to ship toys in time for Christmas, and the struggle comes to life. The best part is it's all true, and that you begin to understand that the etoy group were more than a bunch of merry pranksters; they were truly insane and ambitious, as most great artists tend to be. (And what they did was certainly a type of greatness in our current age; once set upon as innocents, they turned round and fought back!)

This book flows like a movie, a old-fashioned us-versus-them picture. Yet underneath the histrionics lie very serious issues which the authors explore with great diligence. The domain name system. The internet bubble. The arrogance of corporate America. The legal blow by blows. The spirit of hackerish subversion that governs the heart of the internet in almost pioneer fashion. There's a lot of very enlightening background information in this story, and it's treated with rigor.

So there you have it. Highly recommended. Although it's definitely worth reading for fun, they should also make this book mandatory reading in business schools, as a warning to arrogant hot-shot would-be entrepreneurs and to provide thoughtful, diligent insight into the genesis of the New Economy.

I really like this figure. He is a MUST if you are collecting all of the six bounty hunters in ESB. His outfit is very well made (although primarily plastic and a paint job)aside from the pack he has on his back which may fall off time to time if you mess around with him. But he poses great and if you just display them then don't worry about the pack falling off.

I would say he is one of the better Star Wars dolls. His face sculpt is good, and his costum is pretty top-notch. His costum is thick to make him look like the fat, and the body that Hasbro used is the basic G.I. Joe body.

Dengar, best remembered for his stance with the other five members of the defunct bounty hunter's guild in The Empire Strikes Back, is back with a vengeance, looking his facially marred best when huddled together with members of his proud Han-hunting procession. The 12" figure isn't bad, either, with a few merits that are great and a couple of disappointing features to mingle in to the overall package.

First, I have to deal with the issue of packaging, one I'm not really happy with when I see any newly released "older" figures. Its not that I really worry about the boxes, per say, but I think that the setup does influences choices, and if I weren't a bounty hunter fan then I might have passed up this blandly boxed Empire recreation. Next, there's the issue of the head and the hands, both of which don't really seem go with the figure at first. In fact, when I glanced that plastic molded head staring out at me from an otherwise cloth-ridden body, I was saddened. I had wished for it to be wrapped and not simply fitted to a clothed body, but neither the hands or the head are like that. Still, I do have to say that the figure is really a nice addition to my collection, looking better out of the box than in it. Here you have nothing overly surprising, for he's your atypical new release 12' model; with snapped-on armor that you never want to attempt to liberate adjoined with white cloth underneath, plastic boots anchoring a body that sometimes likes to stand, a limited flexibility, and a nice replica weapon/backpack (a snap-on) thrown in for good measure. The coloration is done well, plus the costuming was more than I had hoped for.

Basically, I would say that this is a worthy buy because I'm a bounty hunter fan. Still, its something worth checking into even if you like simply like the movie, giving you something to fixate on freezing anyone you meet in carbonite with.

This was a simply stated book that gave common sense examples.

The chapters were easy to understand without having to have your professor explain everything.

There are a couple of chapters that seem like they should be reorganized, and a couple of chapters that should be put in a different order. Overall though, this is a very good book to help you understand Human Resource Management.

I suspect that a new edition will be out shortly. Some of the Internet links sprinkled throughout this book are broken, and the text frequently refers to conditions as they were, "as of mid-1997." Hopefully, the authors will employ a proofreader/style editor, as the sytnax is awkward in a few places. That said, this is a good introductory book. The creative integration of Internet links and video case studies ("On Location at Showtime," and ABC News reports on business trends and issues) add to the value of the text. An Internet site allows instructors to develop an on-line syllabus for students to view and download. Key terms are set on the margins in blue print, repeating their definitions from the text. Summaries at the end of each chapter do the same, and include questions designed to verify reader knowledge of major concepts. The book dwells at length on diversity issues, which is appropriate, given the plethora of Exceutive Orders, Supreme Court decisions, and legislation mandating various EEO/affirmative action practices in the HR field. The chapters on recruitment, selection, and training are the strongest in the book, and cover the topics in a fair amount of depth. The chapter on labor unions reveals a pro-union bias; otherwise, the book is ideology-free. Overall, this is a more than adequate treatment of the subject, and is quite serviceable.