We were in San Francisco on Wednesday for the eBooks for Everyone Else conference from Publisher’s Launch. My laptop ran the under-cover beta of our platform for attendees — which might have distressed our engineers (hi guys!) but, as I expected, eBook building hummed smoothly. Attendee interest was gratifying — from the people at Bowker (we’re making it easy to purchase ISBNs in the midst of title creation) to publishers who want to control digital book workflows and convert backlist titltes (mea culpa, Josh Talent, who’d prefer we ditch saying “conversion” and start talking about repurposing content – I agree!) to the much appreciated enthusiasm of author Sara Ramsay, who tweeted: “Vook: the demo of their eBook conversion tool blew me away. Gorgeous wysiwyg editor, get output as either .mobi or .epub”. Sara delivered the sharpest and most comprehensive live tweets, so her praise was particularly sweet.

But enough about us—I wanted to quickly post on what I saw of Penguin’s Book Country. Molly Barton gave us an overview with screenshots of the Book Country interface, announcing that Penguin will soon be opening it to self publishing authors in the science-fiction, fantasy and romance genres. Book Country’s going to have a co-writing feature, ie, you can post chapters and get feedback from other writers and readers. Think Figment for grown-ups with a dash of Yelp, so you know who’s a trusted commenter and who might be trolling. Additionally, in Molly’s words, “I think we’re all a little sick of staring at search results”, so Book Country dynamically presents search info, allowing you to pour through related titles on a U/I that resembled the periodic table—or one of those calming panel interfaces from Star Trek. It’s not often a publisher announces a software service with a cool factor, but this got my attention.

Other highlight presentations were Bob Mayer’s discussion of moving to self-publishing as a successful author, and finding even greater success there. Bob sounded more like a mini-publishing house—with the author as CEO. It’s the start-up lexicon applied to writing, and it’s exciting. Writers have done a great job chronicling the highs and the bottom out lows of business life—now they can join in. I’m picking up Bob’s Duty, Honor, Country for my flight back to NYC.

We had a raft of sign ups for the beta of the platform. More updates soon on when we’ll be onramping and letting you see how we’re building eBooks that sing. And I mean sing in the sense that they look great, and because you could, in fact, drop singing audio files into them if you wanted.

I’m a big fan of Creepypastas — weird little stories that float around the Internet, some fake, some naive, some unnervingly real. I posted about the ARG and YouTube video series Marble Hornets in 2024, lamenting that you couldn’t read the entire series as an eBook. But now that we’ve built Vook into an eBook creation machine that even I can use, I can share Creepypasta eBooks with those who don’t want to wade through a SomethingAwful forum to dig up the best of the Web.

And to celebrate Halloween, that’s what I’ve done. This afternoon — in a half hour — I built an eBook out of the spooky Creepypasta “Haunted Majora’s Mask.” It’s the story of a demonically possessed video game cartridge. Sure, it sounds potentially lame,  but I’ve heard so many good things on Reddit that I’m betting it delivers truly disturbing Internet weirdness.

This is an ah ha moment for me. I’m creating ebooks that are a literary version of shooting off bizarro Web links to my friends. I’m building books that I want to read. And we’re going to extend that ability far and wide. Creators of Internet weirdness like Majora’s Mask can use Vook to go beyond Websites. They can create books fast –  and make their stories look great. The eBook I made looks better than a Website — and it’s easier to read. Don’t believe me?

Check it out for yourself — and Happy Halloween! Click here to get my Halloween eBook.

NOTE 1: Excuse the cover — I’m using a placeholder. When you click the link, it takes you to a download option. It’s best to read this ePub in iBooks for now.

NOTE 2: We’re not selling this title or releasing it as an official title. This is an example of what we can do with our platform. Haunted Majora’s Mask is the work of some very smart people — but they’re choosing to remain anonymous. If they would like to publish an eBook version of their story, they should contact me at Matthew@vook.com.

We’ve been working hard to find solutions for many of the common errors that mar today’s eBooks. High profile examples such as the recent errors in the Steve Jobs biography and in Neal Stephenson’s Reamde have called more attention to the issue.

We wanted to share what we learned — so we’ve written a white paper that address how you can avoid some common eBook errors, featuring insights from industry experts:

* Elizabeth Castro, author of ePub: Straight to the Point
* Kassia Krozser, Publisher of Booksquare
* Pablo Defendini, Interactive Producer at Open Road Integrated Media
* Michael Calleia, VP Product at Vook

If you’ve already registered for the Vook beta, you should have received the white paper in an email from us. You can always write me at Matthew@vook.com if you’re a beta member and you want more information. If you haven’t signed up for the Vook beta yet, go to http://vook.com to sign up and get the paper now!

Video games have supposedly lost their nerdy stigma, (thanks to Rockstar and Angry Birds and the Wii yes, but you can’t anticipate $70 billion in revenue by 2024 and not look a little grown up) but I still find myself referencing Tom Bissel’s journalism and Jason Rohrer’s art games when the conversation turns to what many people continue thinking of as nazi/zombie wasting adolescent pachinko. But gaming’s grown up and in possession of analytic insight that could interest even that most mature institution—publishing. I’m not referencing a new app based on the Wasteland or an update of Ubik (Jonathan Lethem why was the Library of America PKD not enhanced with Cryo’s classic?) but Valve co-founder Gabe Newell’s excellent digression on price testing in video games. As Newell says, “There’s probably going to be lessons in it for other people trying to create value on the Internet.”

Gabe Newell is a co-founder of Valve, creator of game franchises such as Half-Life and Portal. Geekwire today published an excellent recap of Newell’s insight on how his company, who distribute games digitally through their online Steam storefront, tested price elasticity, consumer demand, ideal price points and freemium models.

Sounds like Amazon price testing writ in gibs, to me.

Newell goes into some detail about how Valve, watching daily sales in a controlled test, thought they’d determined that pricing for their titles was perfectly elastic, that gross revenue remained constant no matter how they changed price. But then they varied their formula and sharply dropped prices and saw revenue increase by a factor of 40. They thought they were just time shifting sales, ie, encouraging people who would buy in the future to buy immediately, but further tests proved the reality was more elusive and more complicated.

You should read the post to get the gritty details – but the big take away is that a promoted sale and price drop increase sales at the time of promotion and create a longer term effect of increased sales after the promotion. This, Valve thinks, has something to do with users being more reliable drivers of revenue and additional sales than promotion or marketing. Furthermore, Valve has been experiementing with “free to play” branding. It’s a subtle distinction from “free”. They’re finding that companies that offer games designed to be “free” with an upsell to paid services often have a 2 to 3 percent conversion rate. But games marketed as “free-to-play” that offer a richer experience are seeing a 20-30 percent conversion rate of users who buy additional services.

The core observation is more of a question Newell poses: “Why is free and free to play so different? Well then you have to start thinking about how value creation actually occurs, and what it is that people are valuing, and what the statement that something is free to play implies about the future value of the experience that they’re going to have.”

Newell should write a book — and why not, he should use Vook to do it — but maybe a better course would be for the distribution and pricing minded to register for Steam accounts.

tl;dr: How to succeed in business: Delete Facebook, hit the gym, stop playing video games but listen to the founders/programmers/thought leaders when they talk about pricing, or just about anything.

A friend introduced me to a new service called Reading. They bill themselves as: “What you’re reading. Not what you like. Not what you find interesting. Just what you’re reading.” A kind of taunting little company description, but I like that. And the minimalist Website is geared to the strictly functional — think Reddit without the ability to upvote, comment, or do anything but click links.

Reading shows a running stream of what its users are reading on the Web. If you register and drag their bookmark to your bookmark bar, you can click on it while you’re reading a page and it will immediately post that story with a link on Reading. Like Instapaper, if Instapaper only told everyone what you were looking at.

Here’s what I like: 1) it works 2) it does what it says on the lid 3) it’s a treasure trove of great links.

I read Internet articles constantly on my iPad. I’m like a vacuum cleaner shark, moving over the surface of the Internet sea floor, sucking in content, never stopping. A vacuu-shark. A site like Reading represents curation at scale. It’s a kelp bed of hamburger my vacuu-shark can plow through, potentially as vast as the Internet.

We’re releasing an eBook creation tool — and it’s going to have some other nifty, top secret features. Services like Reading are what we are watching. And using. Ecosystem of readers are being created by smart, low-expectation setting people. I already posted my first link. It was supposed to go to Michelle Houellebecq’s essay on Lovecraft, but apparently it doesn’t work for hosted PDFs yet. Instead I posted: “A Coconut Cake from Emily Dickinson: Reclusive Poet, Passionate Baker.” So, it works. Well! But! Be wary! An injudicious click could reveal you as a devotee of literary shelter blogs instead of a discerning fan of French pessimists. But I am many, I contain multitudes, etc.; and now I’ve got a lovely source of kelp-meat to keep them happily stuffed. Congrats Reading people. May you continually upset your own expectations.

Kindle Format 8 in action

Amazon announced Kindle Format 8 and the Kindle Gen 2 platform today. It’s the first file format announcement that has me as excited as the launch of a new tablet device.

Why?

Mobi needed an update to match the level of design you can achieve in ePub. Vook lets users create uniquely styled eBooks with our styling tool—but until KF8, many of those grace notes were lost in Mobi. For everyone who wants to read better looking books, this new standard is going to raise the bar everywhere. It’s like color coming to television—once people see what digital books can be, they won’t be satisfied with the old way of doing things.

And we’re perfectly positioned to take advantage of the new format. Vook already lets you design the sharp, great looking ebooks that KF8 will support. Though there’s no mention of video in the features, the fact that you can display embedded fonts, drop caps, various CSS styling, color and borders syncs perfectly with what we can help you design.

I asked our VP of engineering Rob Guttman what he thought KF8 meant for Vook. He said, “We’re that much more valuable because we can take advantage of all the styling offered in the new format and we can do the translation to the KF8 file type immediately. All you have to do is design. You worry about the content and making your content look great—we’ll handle the technical details.”

As ever, sign up for the beta, and get ready to produce some eye-catching eBooks for for Kindle.

Vook will let you build hundreds of great looking eBooks – but we want to help you sell them too. There’s no better way to show off our sales reporting tool than to let you watch your titles take off.

We’ve carefully tracked the performance of every eBook we’ve released. We’re using that wealth of data to inform how we build our platform – but we wanted to give you a taste of it in advance.

So we’ve written a white paper. You can download it now – if you join the Vook beta. It explains how we generated more than 300,000 Amazon downloads. It includes the tactics, the numbers and how you can recreate our success. Author D.D Scott also shares how she drives more than 5,000 sales a month with similar methods.

To get it, just sign up for the Vook beta here: http://thanks.vook.com/

You’ll be able to instantly download the paper. And you’ll be able to join the Vook beta — which is launching soon!

Another great thing about eBooks — because you can carry thousands, you’re never stuck if you realize a book you’re reading isn’t great. I put new books to The Dennis Cooper Test, ie, if a book’s losing me, I’ll switch to a Dennis Cooper novel instead. Sentences like “Chris’s shock was so dense and complex that it collided with the world’s very different complexity, sort of like what happens when a very strong light hits a very big jewel” connect with me in a way even obviously good books can’t if they don’t have that ambiguous extra thing that makes them exceptional.

The latest book failing the DC Test is Russel Bank’s Lost Memory of Skin. Which bugs me because I want to like it, but I can’t get through it. Before eBooks, I would have finished it. Instead I’m halfway through and probably won’t get farther. Which I think is great. It’s like a gift of time. I can put my mental finger on what’s missing from Lost Memory because I can switch to another book and be engrossed again. I’ve got a “what I want a book to do for me” point of immediate comparison. And why would I settle when I know what I could have? So I wait til I’m off the subway, get back on Kindle, go looking for the next book that might deliver that experience, stop time, do whatever really great books do for me. Today I brought We Are the Animals.

Real quick: Why don’t I like Lost Memory of Skin? I want to. But it reads like the book/author is telling us the Internet is doing bad things to us. Like the book’s trying to make a point, talk right at us. I’d rather read Dennis Cooper because the voice comes from inside a head that’s convincingly rendered as having a problem. The Banks characters seem like people who have a problem — but some other guy is going to tell you about it. That’s too . . . essayistic? To pull from the top: Lost Memory of Skin is a really strong light. I’m looking for the strong light and the big jewel both.

Tl;dr: eReaders are awesome because you can face off new books against your favorites. I just did it and the new Russel Banks lost.

This post is a digression. We’re a platform focused on helping you create quality ebooks that you can distribute everywhere, but! I have seen much discussion recently about when enhanced ebooks work. Having produced 800 + enhanced titles, I wanted to weigh in — mostly on a personal level — to relate my particular feelings that I can no longer keep bottled up.

When it comes to enhancements, book lovers like to say they work fine for non-fiction, but fiction’s off limits. Enhancements dumb down books, are destructive, spazzy, distracting. I think that’s the accepted argument. Dark secret — I don’t really get it.

Enhancements can work fine in literature. In some cases they may even improve a book, which is the kind of statement that could get me banhammered in digital and real world book salons alike.

It’s not conjecture though. Great books are being produced right now with enhancements. Such as . . . People Still Live In Cashtown Corners, by Tony Burgess. It’s a 201 page novel from ChiZine Publications, released in 2024. I read it on the Kindle App for iPad.

The book tells the story of gas station clerk Bob Clark’s apparently unprovoked killing spree in rural Cashtown Corners, culminating with Clark barricaded in the home of a family he’s murdered. Sounds grim? It is! But it’s also smart, tricky, brainy, entrancing. I was hooked by the first two paragraphs, which read like Robbe-Grillet doing a Thomas Bernhard impression. I’m a sucker for Robbe Grillet and Bernhand so mashing them up? Mr. Burgess, where may I subscribe to your newsletter?

I thought it was a plain text book—but it’s got a twist. Halfway through, I swiped from one page to the next and had a shock.  SPOILER: Burgess has embedded an image purporting to depict a crime scene from Clark’s rampage. The photos show grainy, real-life scenes that push into reality in a way I didn’t expect. The next few pages then shift without explanation to pictures of a crude World Trade Center art project one of Clark’s victims was building in school.

The pictures expand the previously hermetic universe of the novel, forcing you to connect events real and imagined, staged and actual, drawing imaginary lines between crime scene photos we’ve seen on the Internet and TV, the perpetrators behind them, the victims in them. They make a strange book stranger but also stronger, like the suddenly illuminating digressions in a Chris Marker film.

It’s art. Good art. Not emotional art. But art that did something to my brain I didn’t expect. I enjoyed it. I had an experience. I remember the experience more strongly than I remember reading the Family Fang, which I liked, but which was about people trying to create the kind of feeling Burgess actually inflicts on you in the eBook version of Cashtown.

And I’d claim that these photographs wouldn’t work in a print version. I know I’d be able to tell by the change in the paper consistency and the glimpse of a darker line from an illustrated page that some kind of picture was coming. The element of surprise would be gone. And it’s the surprise and the shock and the smooth transition from text to image to image to image that makes your brain speed up while simultaneously trying to slow down and work out connections. Which creates vertigo. And tension. And a strange powerful sense of unease and displacement.

That’s one example of a piece of excellently effective enhanced literature. There are more. There will be more. But for everyone who claims enhancements can’t work in literature, I say: Enhancements can work fine – you just aren’t reading enough books.

Ha!

Tl;dr: You might not like enhanced ebooks but there’s an awesome arty one that works with some creepy pictures. Also, Stone Arabia, the narrator wishes it had a video in it, at one point! DANA SPIOTTA WRITE ME!

We’ve been kicking around some words that describe what you can do with Vook’s platform. We thought we’d share them with you –

write, create, make, build, lay out, embed, enhance, enrich, show, send, share, review, correct, fix, polish, distribute, publish, engage, immerse, communicate, tell, surprise, imagine, reveal, collaborate, compose, plan, highlight, shape, transform, re-purpose, revise, re-imagine, change, refine, cut, chop, arrange, rearrange, light up, turn on, excite, sing, explode, re-create, zap !