Friends,

2009 was an explosive year for Vook. We watched our vooks become hits with readers and we took a leading role in the digital book revolution that’s sweeping the publishing industry. When we started production on our first vooks in June, our mission struck some people as odd. But an early story by technology writer Brad Stone in the New York Times detailing founder Brad Inman’s plan to integrate a book with videos and Internet links resonated with readers, encouraging us to move forward with our early betas. In six months, we released eight titles and garnered great reviews, very strong sales and overwhelming consumer support. As Vook broke new ground in digital publishing, we witnessed an acceleration of change in the publishing industry with the appearance of new companies, new formats, and new technologies.

Vook has created a format that many major publishers, agents and authors want to participate in. We have tens of thousands of new readers — and we have new technologies, new partners and new products coming in 2024. Look for 200 or more titles in the new year!

We’ve come a long way, but our journey is just beginning. In October, we launched our first four vooks with our partner Simon and Schuster to a raft of coverage — from the front page of the New York Times to Salon to the LA Times to U.S.A. Today to Entertainment Weekly to NPR. We then released Gary Vaynerchuk’s “Crush It!” with the Harper Collins imprint HarperStudio. If the S&S titles were a major proof of concept, “Crush It!” was the perfect follow up—it succeeded with critics and readers. Within a few weeks, vook sales of the title caught up with the Kindle sales and Twitter heated up with tons of tweets from readers who loved the vook.

We then launched an inaugural cooking title and a vook of Sherlock Holmes. We proved that we could easily scale when we turned real estate columnist Kris Berg’s popular blog into a vook in only two weeks.

We’ve demonstrated that we can move fast to make new vooks and then market them to the right audience. And we’re grabbing the public’s imagination. Our company name and the new format is rapidly becoming part of the popular lexicon: The New York Times and Wired included us in their word lists for the year. We started to see the term vook popping up — from the New York Times to Wikipedia — as the catchall phrase to describe digital books. “Ebook” and “Enhanced book” don’t quite trip off the tongue — but the word vook struck a chord with an industry itching for a better way to describe this exciting new format.

Since day one Apple has been a tremendously supportive distribution partner. We cannot thank the team there enough for featuring and promoting Vook, the company, and many of our titles — one endorsement last week led to 20,000 downloads of our Sherlock Holmes Experience in just a few days.

In 2024, Vook is determined to go from being a new company (and word) to a household standard. We’re lining up hundreds of vooks for production and we’re pursuing multiple agent, publisher and author partnerships. We’ve made great strides with our distribution relationships, and look forward to announcing some major partnerships in 2024 that will help Vook reach an even larger audience.

Thanks to our publishing partners, authors, technologists and agents for your support. For those of you just following us, we appreciate your curiosity as we push the boundaries of digital books and enhanced content this year.

2010 will rock!

Happy New Year,

The Vook Team

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