Today we opened Vook to the world, enabling anyone who visits our site to access our platform and create great looking eBooks, distribute them to the major marketplaces, and track their sales. Vook’s the product of heroic work from our design and engineering teams and voluminous and insightful input from hundreds of closed beta-users, whose feedback helped make the platform what it is today. Here’s a roundup of what the press has been saying: Publishers Weekly’s Craig Teicher: ”. . . Read more…
A few months ago, I left my iPad in the back of a New York City taxi-cab. My reaction was not the same as losing a cell phone or a stolen laptop. Losing those devices is an inconvenience, but I grieved the loss of my iPad as I do when losing a half-finished book. My emotional connection to a book and my tablet are the same. Nothing is better suited for the post-PC world than books. Tablets are a back-to-the-future Read more…
Didn’t get to attend my presentation at Publishing Business Conference & Expo? That’s OK, the presentation is now on SlideShare
We missed a year of SXSW and the thing grew ten times in size. We hit town Sunday, March 11 to participate in NYTech Meetup’s Made in New York Event—and the few hours we spent outside of it was like visiting a tech Mardi Gras in the middle of Texas. Google and Blackberry houses had colonized the south of downtown, ringed by specialty food carts like chuckwagons. VCs and CFOs were giving presentations on budgets in dive bars a block Read more…
So, you’ve written a great book. Now people will just automagically discover it and suddenly you’ll be a best selling author, right? Not surprisingly, it’s a bit more complicated than that. We wanted to give you a little advice, based on our experience working in digital publishing. Today, we’ll look at how to spread the word through social media. First of all, which networks should you be on? Most of our resources focus on Twitter and Facebook because that’s where Read more…
Everyone from the DOJ to Amazon.com is weighing in on the best way to price an eBook. It seems like a good time to bring up our eBook pricing whitepaper again; especially in light of us commenting in an MSNBC article on the DOJ investigation. Beyond the struggles between the big players, we wanted to highlight what we’ve learned publishing digital content and help you understand some ways you can think about pricing an ebook — or even just buying one. It’s all about the Read more…
When Jonathan Franzen bashed Twitter, he was just carrying on the relentless crusade he’s waging against the Internet and social media every time he steps up to a mic. He’s like a bookish, bizarro world Chuck D. — Black Steel Glasses in the Hour of Social Media Chaos. The outrage he’s kicked off makes him kind of the closest thing literature has to a bad boy though. From Michelle Houellebecq to Jonathan Littell to Jonathan Franzen, middle aged white guys Read more…
We launched bi-coastal in SF and NYC, but we’ve built so much of our ePublishing platform at our West 25th street office that we can say Vook is cloud-based but proudly New York made. And for a city-based tech-start up, there’s no better sign we’re officially in the game than having the New York Tech Meet-Up invite us to participate in their SXSW event, “Made In New York.” It’s like when the bartender down the street invites you to his Read more…
eBook adoption has spawned technology innovation, allowing traditional publishers to realize sweeping productivity gains that should drive revenue growth and competitiveness. But those gains will only come from initiatives to adopt and integrate new tech solutions. eBook creation infrastructure and services are ripe for change. Vook estimates eBook costs such as design, conversion, enhancement, marketing, QA, distribution and sales tracking amounts to hundreds of millions of dollars this year alone — eating away at book publisher profits. Add that to Read more…