I’m a big fan of Creepypastas — weird little stories that float around the Internet, some fake, some naive, some unnervingly real. I posted about the ARG and YouTube video series Marble Hornets in 2024, lamenting that you couldn’t read the entire series as an eBook. But now that we’ve built Vook into an eBook creation machine that even I can use, I can share Creepypasta eBooks with those who don’t want to wade through a SomethingAwful forum to dig Read more…
We’ve been working hard to find solutions for many of the common errors that mar today’s eBooks. High profile examples such as the recent errors in the Steve Jobs biography and in Neal Stephenson’s Reamde have called more attention to the issue. We wanted to share what we learned — so we’ve written a white paper that address how you can avoid some common eBook errors, featuring insights from industry experts: * Elizabeth Castro, author of ePub: Straight to the Read more…
We tasted our own cooking at Vook on Wednesday. Each and every employee spent the day with the new Vook platform, creating their own eBooks. Wow, what fun! The purpose was four fold: 1. A bug tracking contest. Awards and prizes were dished out to those who found the most bugs. We stress tested the technology. 2. A trial run for on-ramping partners. This was a dress rehearsal for training — and it helped us perfect the process for giving Read more…
From formatting errors to styling challenges to distribution woes (oh my!), eBook-making can be challenging. Although our tool makes it easy to design your eBook by dragging-and-dropping, Vook knows that what eBook makers really need is a community that will toil night and day, holidays and weekends, to overcome the obstacles to creating quality work—and to getting it out there! So we’re proud to announce that an important feature of the Vook technology platform is our virtual community of Vookmakers Read more…
Video games have supposedly lost their nerdy stigma, (thanks to Rockstar and Angry Birds and the Wii yes, but you can’t anticipate $70 billion in revenue by 2024 and not look a little grown up) but I still find myself referencing Tom Bissel’s journalism and Jason Rohrer’s art games when the conversation turns to what many people continue thinking of as nazi/zombie wasting adolescent pachinko. But gaming’s grown up and in possession of analytic insight that could interest even that Read more…
A friend introduced me to a new service called Reading. They bill themselves as: “What you’re reading. Not what you like. Not what you find interesting. Just what you’re reading.” A kind of taunting little company description, but I like that. And the minimalist Website is geared to the strictly functional — think Reddit without the ability to upvote, comment, or do anything but click links. Reading shows a running stream of what its users are reading on the Web. Read more…
Amazon announced Kindle Format 8 and the Kindle Gen 2 platform today. It’s the first file format announcement that has me as excited as the launch of a new tablet device. Why? Mobi needed an update to match the level of design you can achieve in ePub. Vook lets users create uniquely styled eBooks with our styling tool—but until KF8, many of those grace notes were lost in Mobi. For everyone who wants to read better looking books, this new Read more…
Vook will let you build hundreds of great looking eBooks – but we want to help you sell them too. There’s no better way to show off our sales reporting tool than to let you watch your titles take off. We’ve carefully tracked the performance of every eBook we’ve released. We’re using that wealth of data to inform how we build our platform – but we wanted to give you a taste of it in advance. So we’ve written a Read more…
Another great thing about eBooks — because you can carry thousands, you’re never stuck if you realize a book you’re reading isn’t great. I put new books to The Dennis Cooper Test, ie, if a book’s losing me, I’ll switch to a Dennis Cooper novel instead. Sentences like “Chris’s shock was so dense and complex that it collided with the world’s very different complexity, sort of like what happens when a very strong light hits a very big jewel” connect Read more…
This post is a digression. We’re a platform focused on helping you create quality ebooks that you can distribute everywhere, but! I have seen much discussion recently about when enhanced ebooks work. Having produced 800 + enhanced titles, I wanted to weigh in — mostly on a personal level — to relate my particular feelings that I can no longer keep bottled up. When it comes to enhancements, book lovers like to say they work fine for non-fiction, but fiction’s Read more…
