A start-up called Chegg is releasing a new online service to let people read electronic textbooks on iPads and computers.

There’s an old saying that if you want to be a leader and you see a parade, jump in front of it. So it is with digital textbooks, an area that’s about to experience the high-tech equivalent of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade as Apple prepares to push into the business.

Apple’s parade will commence on the stage of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York on Thursday, when the company is expected to announce a foray into electronic textbooks in front of an audience of invited media. Hopping out in front of the Apple spectacle is a start-up called Chegg that rents physical textbooks and is releasing a new online service on Wednesday to let people read electronic textbooks on iPads and computers.

Chegg’s new eTextbook Reader is a Web site, but it is written in the new HTML5 programming language, which allows Chegg to simulate the experience of using a mobile app written specifically for a device like the iPad. While browsing a book on the site, people can mark text with yellow highlighter, add notes like the ones they would normally scrawl in the margins of a printed textbook and submit questions to be answered by other Chegg customers.

Creating the site in HTML5 means Chegg users will be able to access their textbooks and related marginalia from any device with a browser and an Internet connection.

Dan Rosensweig, president and chief executive officer of Chegg, said in an interview that the company was not introducing the service now because of Apple’s event later this week, which he said he had not been briefed on. Mr. Rosensweig said that Chegg had been working on its new service for more than a year, and that it wanted to make it available the week after the International Consumer Electronics Show, which was last week in Las Vegas.

Still, he said he was not disappointed by the attention he expected Apple to bring to the category. “We like whenever Apple enters a field because it creates focus,” he said.

In the past, Chegg has offered its customers the option of accessing electronic versions of textbooks. Mr. Rosensweig said that electronic textbooks were currently only about 3 to 6 percent of Chegg’s business, and that he did not expect the huge textbook market to go digital overnight. But he believes the numbers of people using them will grow quickly in the next few years.

“This year’s eighth grader is not going to go to college without demanding that these things are available,” he said.

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