My Ebook is a new service for creating rich multimedia ebooks. My Ebook allows users to create ebooks that contain text, images, and videos on each page. My Ebook users can create ebooks from scratch or upload their existing PDF files to display in a book format. The PDF option reminds me of the Yudu ebook service that I wrote about last year.

When starting an ebook from scratch on My Ebook, users can import images from their Flickr, Facebook, Picasa, and Photobucket accounts or upload new images directly to My Ebook. If you don’t have any digital images you can select some from My Ebook’s gallery. Videos can also be embedded into the pages of My Ebook. My Ebook provides a good variety of themes and templates to give each ebook a different look and feel. Ebooks created using My Ebook can be embedded into blogs and websites or shared via email.

Applications for Education
My Ebook provides a good platform on which students can create ebooks on just about any topic. Rather than writing a traditional report, students can create a book that includes the traditional “report paper” as well as video and images to complement the report. If you wanted to build an online gallery of your students’ work you could have them embed their finished ebooks into a blog or wiki.

One word of caution, you may not want to let your students browse the library of ebooks without supervision. I didn’t see anything that was explicitly bad (the terms of service forbid that type of content) but there is some material that you might not want middle school students accessing.

Yudu is a related resource that may be of interest to you.