Many course books for learners of English as a second or foreign language now claim to contain a strong lexical component. Other practitioners meanwhile continue to advocate the use of graded readers to augment vocabulary development. This article reports the findings of vocabulary profiling and analysis of both course books and graded readers and reveals that in neither case do the approaches taken to vocabulary development fully account for recent research into vocabulary acquisition and vocabulary pedagogy. The results of this study establish principles that are used to revisit the graded reader concept and develop a series of "eReaders" within a framework of corpus-based studies and Web 2.0 applications. Initial results in piloting these eReaders suggest that a principled corpus-informed approach to text construction and exploitation has strong potential to help learners develop both an in-depth and productive knowledge of the most frequently used words in English, and thereby fill the void left by traditional methods of dealing with vocabulary development. (Contains 17 figures and 1 table.)