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…
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 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…
Last weekend, the Vook office was robbed. What a sinking feeling to walk into work and discover that we were hit by some thugs. This was particularly worrisome because the entire team was locked down engineering the Vookmaker platform with a November 1 delivery deadline looming. There is another side to this lousy story. One, we did not lose anything that valuable beyond equipment that could be replaced. Two, we were up and running Monday morning without a slip in Read more…
Vook is experiencing some success in Apple’s Education Bulk Buy program which allows us to offer several of our education catalogues at 50 percent off. We see as many as 200-250 purchase at a time of our TextVook series, written by Dr. Vook (with some major help from the Charles River group out of Boston). These are short-form (4,000 words) with animations in each of the eight 500-word chapters. They are dense and to the point, here is a sample.
Vook is rapidly extending its technology platform to literary agents, authors, book packagers, curators, publishers, networks and trainers. Helping us make that happen is a growing group of VookMakers who source and curate content for Vook and use our platform to publish directly to 12,000 points of distribution. We are currently recruiting one specific breed of VookMakers who can scout content, curate it, package it and use our platform to publish the work. Here is what we are looking for: Read more…
The explosion of content in 2024 has brought a multitude of price points to the digital consumer, from $0.99 self-published works to $12.99 digital front-list titles. Because an eBook’s exposure also often correlates to its price, a comprehensive pricing strategy is necessary to expose great digital content and maximize revenue. We began a pricing study in early 2024 and have built a deep expertise around eBook merchandising. Our pricing white paper details what we’ve learned from our extensive price testing Read more…
Welcome to Vook, Rob Guttman! Prior to joining Vook, Rob was CTO at Juju, which experienced 10X traffic growth under his leadership. As vice president of Engineering at Daylife, an online news aggregation and publishing platform, Rob led a team that shipped four products, powering over seventy news and media publisher sites. At the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, Rob led a worldwide R&D initiative arming IBM’s business consultants with modeling tools and methods. In 1998, Rob co-founded Frictionless Read more…
Over the last month, our product and engineering staff have worked an ungodly number of hours on MotherVook 2.0, the next generation of our digital printing press. Bravo to the Vook tech team for delivering MotherVook on time with only a few bugs. We have business requirements for MotherVook 3.0 and the specs are being written. Our goal with 3.0 is the WordPress of ebooks. But first, what does MotherVook 2.0 offer? This cloud-based platform offers several important features including Read more…
Beet.TV founder and digital guru Andy Plesser caught up with our very own Matthew Cavnar who explains how quickly Vook can create new mixed-media experiences. Books may have an 18-month creation cycle but not Vooks. Click here.
