For those of you who aren’t gamers or don’t keep reddit open in a browser tab, Game of Thrones isn’t the only property turning television screens into Scandanvian Renaissance Festivals. Video game company Bethesda Software recently released Skyrim, an incredibly detailed, open world role playing game that shipped 3.4 million copies in 2 days and scored a 96 point overall average on review aggregator Metacritic. It’s a definite blockbuster hit, but is it another reason for fantasy lovers to turn Read more…
Everyday we get requests from people who want to build an eBook with Vook immediately. Everyday we look at what we’re building, what our users want and expect, and what we’ve committed to delivering. Our engineering team is working night and day (which isn’t hyperbole, I’ve interrupted them at 2 AM on our conference line in the past)—and the rest of us are constantly using and testing Vook, making sure it meets our standards. On Thanksgiving, I’m not grateful for Read more…
While most of New York was sleeping off Saturday night this past Sunday morning, Vook was answering a call from Diversion Books. Diversion had an issue. They’d been working with billionaire businessman, investor and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban to produce an eBook out of his blog content. But they had a sudden deadline: 5 AM Monday morning. In the past, having to produce an eBook in hours and distribute it to the marketplaces would have required someone building the Read more…
I raved yesterday about going to the National Book Awards; now I’m trying to catch up on reading the winners I didn’t grab from our table display — and I’ve hit a problem. Only 3 of the 4 National Book Award winning titles are available as eBooks—Nikky Finney’s collection of poems Head Off & Split is not available digitally. Dianna Dilworth also sharply caught this at eBook Newser, and I wish it was more widely remarked. I run into this Read more…
Representing Vook at the National Book Awards last night, I found myself sharing a table with Susan Minot, Calvin Trillin, Francine du Plexis Grey, Rachel Cobb, Morgan Entrekin and Elisabeth Schmitz. If you enter those names into Google at once, the first result is the all caps phrase “EXCLAMATION POINT CLOSE QUOTE”—which about replicates how the experience felt, i.e. so thrilling it was constantly being shouted over the phone by my brain’s old-timey newsman. We were one table from the Read more…
The other day someone asked, “What do you think digital publishing’s going to look like in six months?” I said, “Everyone’s going to be doing it.” Media companies, news organizations, movie studios, record labels—digital book production’s going to be as expected as a social media presence. The Guardian, Huffington Post, and the Wall Street Journal already publish their own books—today the L.A. Times released its first title, “A Nightmare Made Real” by reporter Christopher Goffard. The book’s a Kindle, iBooks, Read more…
Reading Gregory Cowles’ review of [Sic], a memoir by the composer Joshua Cody concerning his experience with cancer, chemo, cocaine, destructive relationships and insanity, I was pleasantly struck by two observations—1) that Cowles describes Cody, at 34, as a “young” composer and 2) that Cowles wished, “the book came embedded with MP3s in addition to its photos and paintings and scrap-paper notes.” With his sympathetic view of multi-media and youth, Cowles is my kind of reviewer — I was about Read more…
The Vook team — + friends and family — pounded on the Vook platform over the last two days, searching high and low for bugs, defects and sloppy user experiences. This is our second internal attempt at breaking the system and finding ways to improve the product. Yesterday, everyone at Vook created multiple eBooks. Some of the outputs looked awesome, some failed the test and others were near perfect — but not good enough. We are in that gray zone, Read more…
We sent an update about Vook to our beta registrants yesterday (hi, all of you!) and the response was overwhellming. People are excited about getting into the platform! And we’re excited to give it to you! I’m getting back to the individual requests today and tomorrow, so I appreciate your patience if you wrote me. If you haven’t heard about what we’re up to, I’ll recap the highlights below. And if you haven’t joined the Vook beta, go do it Read more…
While listening to an audiobook version of Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows, our engineer Amanuel was surprised to hear Carr discuss Simon & Schuster’s creation of “vooks”. I’m familiar with Carr’s proposition that the Internet may be dimming our cognition, wrecking our attention span and making us stupid. I hadn’t planned to read the book—like anyone, I don’t want to hear my favorite thing might be bad for me. But once I found out we were mentioned? To Amazon! Two things Read more…
