Our Vook User Contest showed off what savvy creatives could build with our platform. Now see what happens when Vook lights up content from one of the world’s leading professional services organizations, Ernst & Young. We partnered with Ernst & Young and Knowledge@Wharton to produce Global Banking 2024, a free enhanced eBook that tackles the biggest questions facing financial institutions today with thoughtful text, sharply produced videos and great insights from the smartest minds in the business. Before Vook, firms like Ernst & Read more…
Vook brings just-in-time manufacturing to eBooks, streamlining production while letting creators build uniquely tweaked and styled and personalized titles. We put the theory to practice with our eBook for Mark Cuban—and today we continued the streak with our partner Jason Allen Ashlock, founder of the Movable Type literary agency, and sportswriter Alan Goldsher, who used the Vook platform to turn out Linsanity: The Improbable Rise of Jeremy Lin, in less than 72 hours. That feat’s got to be the eBook Read more…
We’ve had the same mantra at Vook since we launched: 100 titles the first year, 1,000 titles the second, 10,000 the third, and onwards to one million. Working with publishing partners, authors, agents and our own network of writers, we produced some 1,000 + titles in our first two years, hitting our goal. Now, by extending our platform to others, we’re certain we’re going to produce 10,000 titles in 2024—after all, our beta users built some 500 plus books in Read more…
We had two great pieces of news this week: We released the results of our closed beta and we announced our relationship with the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses to extend Vook to its members at a reduced rate. We’re particularly proud of this deal, because it means more of the small presses we love and support as readers will be able to start making more digital books. The results of our closed beta also got picked up by Read more…
I was sitting in an executive’s office at a major publisher last week. We couldn’t access the wireless network — in fact, there didn’t seem to be a wireless network — so I grabbed a nearby Ethernet cord and plugged it into my Internet port and immediately the port started smoking and the room filled with the smell of burnt plastic. The fire turned out to be superficial, but the metaphor’s apt: Vook’s in the offices of publishers big and small Read more…
We’re proud to announce the results of our Vook Creation Contest. Our team argued over their favorite picks all week—more than 500 titles were in consideration. The range of work shows what you + Vook can do! The winners will receive $1000 worth of Vook Marketing Promotion—and the overall winner also receives a free Vook account for a year. Here are the winners in each of the three categories: And the winners are… Best Design: Create: Transforming Stories of Art, Life Read more…
Our platform’s a work in progress—and it always will be. The only technology that’s ever ‘done’ is a technology that’s obsolete (insert lazy joke about the printing press here). As new file types (ePub3, KF8) emerge, we’ll be adapting Vook to produce them quickly, and we constantly adjust to keep track of changes and updates in devices and reader apps. Everyday, our engineers push new code to our platform that improves the experience. But sometimes we have a bigger push Read more…
Heather Stimmler Hall is a Vook tester who’s achieved our dream for the closed beta—she’s helped us improve the platform and produced an ebook she’s actually making money from. Heather writes guidebooks to France, offers private tours of Paris and publishes travel guides. She runs the Website Secrets of Paris and has a devoted audience of followers. We interviewed Heather over Skype to learn more about her success writing, creating and selling eBooks directly with Vook. Can you tell me Read more…
Books used to come off the printing press and anyone could pick them up and read them—the reader requirement was literacy. With digital, it’s different. You can’t read the book you’ve created or purchased until you have the right device to read it on. It’s a new layer of complication, even if it’s elegantly designed, between text and target. Sure, there’s the excellent work of Scribd and other online reading services, but to pick up a flowable text ebook that Read more…