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 the keys to our publishing partners and authors so they can easily access the platform and begin creating exceptional eBooks.
3. Experimented with our Love+Support functionality. We are building a community of eBook creators to make everyone’s job easier by allowing you to collaborate with your peers in the sometimes difficult process of producing quality eBooks.
4. Tested the UX to insure that it is as easy to use as we are promising.

The result? Our team created some spectacular eBooks.

Our engineers and product pros have created a wonderful platform for producing eBooks. It has some kinks, but our engineers and UX folks are working tirelessly to deliver a great experience to our private beta testers who will begin producing eBooks next month.
These are exciting times at Vook, and we will soon show our handiwork to the world.

If you would like to join us in this adventure, sign up at Vook.

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 production, and the awesome Vook tech team delivered “Iteration 6″ of the new platform on Wednesday, on time.

Then, there is the NYPD. Two patrolmen showed up at the office within thirty minutes of us reporting the crime. Then, two CSI print-unit officers were on the scene, followed by two detectives. This impressive group of professionals were thorough, respectful and deliberate in their investigation. They immediately made progress on our case.

Feeling like vulnerable California transplants, the NYPD made us feel taken care of.

This event has become the bar for how Vook will release its beta product to a diverse, influential and smart group of publishers, authors and agents who will be part of our closed beta on November 1.

We will overwhelm them with support, good attitude and follow-through.

The NYPD spirit is alive and well at Vook.

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:

Creation: We want text, images, video, and design. We want experimentation, we want art, and we want an audience. You’ll need to be able to blend multimedia into a comprehensible whole.
Curation: You won’t be able to produce enough titles on your own. At Vook, we reward initiative: We want you to reach out to other bloggers, authors, videographers, and designers. We want you to grow your network and recruit other creators. As a Vookmaker, you’ll be part editor and part originator.

Becoming a VookMaker is easy, find out more by contacting Greg Bateman at Greg@Vook.com

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 in the digital marketplace. It serves as a resource for anyone trying to find the right price point in the “wild west” of app, eBook, and web-based storefronts. We’ve crystalized our research into our proprietary Vook Pricing Engine—a key part of Vook’s business analytics toolkit.

Check out the paper here featuring the 10 golden rules of eBook pricing Pricing White Paper

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 Commerce, a consumer online comparison shopping platform, based on software agent technologies he invented at MIT’s Media Laboratory — earning him a 2024 MIT Technology Review Top 100 Young Innovators Award (TR100).

Prior to MIT, he developed natural language processing software at Motorola and participated in U.S. Army war games to demonstrate and harden Motorola’s battlefield intelligence technologies.

Rob received a MS in Media Arts and Sciences from MIT in 1998 and a BSE in Computer Engineering from the University of Michigan in 1992.

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 file conversion, simple drag-and-drop authoring tools, a quick-and-easy epub and android app creator, a straightforward method for publishing to multiple platforms and a content management system.

The internal Vook creation team will be trained on the new platform on Tuesday and it is being rolled out to partners later this summer.

We have considered renaming the platform, but we all love MotherVook too much.

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.

After a walk through Sausalito tonight, I stopped to examine the books in the window of our local bookshop, not many left around here. A quote from page 100 of Anthony Cronin’s Yeats is Dead was posted on the window

“I think books are wonderful. If they had never been invented and somebody thought of them now, they would be the greatest things ever. I can’t think of anything that had given so much happiness to humanity. No batteries, no wires, no earphones. Absolutely silent, don’t interfere with anybody else, you can take them anywhere with you, in bed, into the bath. And they can’t be broken. You can lie on them, sit on them, prop the door or window sash open and you still can’t damage them.”

Several thoughts rolled around in my head. The quote is factually correct and it captures the sentimentality most of us feel about our physical books. Also, the book store owner is probably feeling defensive as the world changes around her.

I had a final competing thought as I walked home, technology is like fire and water, it goes where it wants and not much can stop it.

Dr. Vook, Ph.D was a boy genius, born and raised in Brussels. Struck by a strange bolt of orange-ray lightning at the age of six, he recovered to find he understood all the information in the world.