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 the cost of distribution from etailers such as Amazon, Apple and Barnes & Noble, and profit margins are squeezed, wiping out gains that should be realized moving from physical to digital products.

A number of publishers are suddenly facing up to these realities and rethinking their workflow, systems and processes. They are questioning their hobbled-together production architecture that layers on incremental performing technologies and outsourced solutions on top of old-world physical book production.

After some honest examination, the bubble gum and paper clip approach to eBooks is proving to be too expensive, too inflexible and too prone to errors. The challenge is the classic “time and money” quandary with publishers using a variety of different vendor and software packages with limited collaboration and tracking capabilities.

Moreover, the current workflows do not scale and both eBook production insiders and executives are admitting it to one another. Demand for a more complete solution has never been stronger.

The weight of legacy systems is often underestimated. The people responsible for eBook production often see new technologies as threatening and do a poor job of estimating the true costs of their approach. And they retreat to the tired practices when they cannot find the perfect solution.

2012 will be the year for publishers to get strategic with their technology solutions — throwing out the past and starting over. If they fail to do so, they will be unable to compete.

In other industries, manufacturers, retailers and financial service companies who wanted to survive all aggressively dumped old systems and started over. Take cloud computing. Companies that ripped out their old IT departments and moved to the cloud are more efficient, agile and competitive. Most importantly, they freed up tech resources that can be devoted to innovation.

For publishes, their one advantage will be timely and cost effective production, but that edge swings on how bold they are wiling to be with their technology solutions.

Our Vook User Contest showed off what savvy creatives could build with our platform. Now see what happens when Vook lights up content from one of the world’s leading professional services organizations, Ernst & Young.

We partnered with Ernst & Young and Knowledge@Wharton to produce Global Banking 2024, a free enhanced eBook that tackles the biggest questions facing financial institutions today with thoughtful text, sharply produced videos and great insights from the smartest minds in the business.

Before Vook, firms like Ernst & Young had to rely on information jammed Websites, cumbersome printed reports or long DVDs to share their knowledge. Thanks to Vook and eBooks and mobile devices, they can now compress their findings into an easy to read, great looking eBook. Since our platform makes it easy to integrate video, audio, images and text, we’re able to apply the advantages of the eBook format to many different kinds of content.

We’re proud to have produced this eBook with Ernst & Young and Knowledge@Wharton; and especially happy that we can share it with you for free. It’s a great introduction to the kind of titles you’ll be able to make on Vook very soon; and of the advantages eBooks offer diverse industries.

eBooks aren’t just for books anymore. . .

Vook brings just-in-time manufacturing to eBooks, streamlining production while letting creators build uniquely tweaked and styled and personalized titles. We put the theory to practice with our eBook for Mark Cuban—and today we continued the streak with our partner Jason Allen Ashlock, founder of the Movable Type literary agency, and sportswriter Alan Goldsher, who used the Vook platform to turn out Linsanity: The Improbable Rise of Jeremy Lin, in less than 72 hours.

That feat’s got to be the eBook equivalent of Lin’s remarkable rise to b-ball dominance, and if video games can rejigger to show his new stats, books should be able to move just as fast (especially with Vook, where they don’t require any coding).

This kind of publishing is going to become more and more common. eBooks are turning out to be a remarkably easy and straight-forward way to deliver content to mobile devices. They’re the smartest kind of tech innovation—one that’s an improvement on what exists and an improvement that actually works.

In a recent New York Review of Books essay on eBooks, Tim Parks remarked, “The ebook. . . would seem to bring us closer than the paper book to the essence of the literary experience.” He considers—like us—the literary experience to be the reader’s experience of words in a sequence. Bound books were a great technology delivery system, but the fundamental technology between the covers—one of the oldest technologies in the world—is writing. When you unite the latest and greatest devices (the iPad, the Android, Sony’s Tablet, Kobo, etc) with that primal innovation, you can begin to see a kind of ‘omega point’ for text-based content. All that’s been missing is a great way to get the content into eBook form smoothly.

It’s appropriate that books on individuals like Jeremy Lin are kicking off this revolution—his success is inspiring and unexpected, but it’s the kind of thing we should have seen coming. Luckily, now we can produce literary experiences that will help us make sense of this dazzling new world almost as quickly as it changes.

Congrats to Jasson Allen Ashlock, Alan Goldsher and Movable Type. You’ve got a winner!

We’ve had the same mantra at Vook since we launched: 100 titles the first year, 1,000 titles the second, 10,000 the third, and onwards to one million. Working with publishing partners, authors, agents and our own network of writers, we produced some 1,000 + titles in our first two years, hitting our goal.

Now, by extending our platform to others, we’re certain we’re going to produce 10,000 titles in 2024—after all, our beta users built some 500 plus books in only 60 days.

I’m laying out how we think about the future after reading a post from blogger and eBook consultant Leonard Feldman on our and Inkling’s move to offer eBook publishing platforms directly to creators. Feldman’s headline wonders if our decision is a smart one, but his column is more thoughtful than incendiary. No entrepreneur needs to be reminded of the difficulties ahead, but we appreciated Feldman’s clear grasp of the challenges.

Start-ups only succeed if they are using technology to solve a problem — the more gnarly the problem the more motivated that we get. For publishers, that problem is making quality ebooks smartly and efficiently. How it’s done today is absurd: it requires multiple  software packages, a multitude of vendors, a slew of touch points with content shipped overseers and shipped back. It does not make sense that the people who are best at finding authors, curating content and editing manuscripts are strapped with this mess.  The costs — direct and in lost opportunity — are staggering.

Fixing it is difficult — and that’s what technologists love to tackle, hard problems.

Inspired by the difficulties that we experienced producing hundreds of titles, we came up with a better and smarter way to create quality eBooks. Keep in mind that start-ups thrive by being responsive and flexible. Our investors love that we can respond to rapidly unfolding challenges and opportunities in a fast-changing industry. We don’t need to react to the upheaval. Instead, we take advantage of it because our team is smart, agile and accustomed to operating in disruptive industries.

In the end, we’ve always been determined to extend Vook. Check out this press release from 2024, where we announce what we were then calling the ‘Mothervook’ platform, which will “provide a streamlined system for creating multi-media ebooks.” The Vook platform is what makes us who we are. We’re eBook technologists, providing technical, engineering solutions to the knotty problems of digital books.

We had two great pieces of news this week: We released the results of our closed beta and we announced our relationship with the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses to extend Vook to its members at a reduced rate. We’re particularly proud of this deal, because it means more of the small presses we love and support as readers will be able to start making more digital books.

The results of our closed beta also got picked up by such excellent outlets as The Street, Market Watch, and The Sacramento Bee. Brand new start-up focused blog Betakit interviewed me in an article that also featured Inkling and 24Symbols. It’s always nice to appear in the company of other exceptional innovators.

It’s been a solid week of news and announcements for us. Expect more in the next few weeks leading up to a really big hullabaloo shortly.

I was sitting in an executive’s office at a major publisher last week. We couldn’t access the wireless network — in fact, there didn’t seem to be a wireless network — so I grabbed a nearby Ethernet cord and plugged it into my Internet port and immediately the port started smoking and the room filled with the smell of burnt plastic. The fire turned out to be superficial, but the metaphor’s apt: Vook’s in the offices of publishers big and small and we are on fire!

Here’s the proof that where there’s smoke, there’s Vook: Today we announced successful progress in our closed beta and the results of our Vook creation contest to the world. The story’s popping up on Yahoo Finance, Market Watch, and the Street.

In 90 days in private beta, 500 users identified 200 bugs that Vook engineers furiously squashed and 31 feature recommendations that we implemented.

The users were a diverse mix of content creators.

• 31% Authors, Bloggers & other individual content owners
• 20% Small Publishers
• 18% Medium Publishers
• 16% News-Related
• 6% Television Networks and Video Companies
• In three months, they produced 584 titles.

“We used the Vook platform to quickly create Mark Cuban’s eBook How to Win at the Sport of Business in only a few hours,” said literary agent Scott Waxman, founder of Diversion Books, an early Vook partner. “With Vook, we can create eBooks with more control and great attention to quality.”

Using Vook, “I launched my eBook, ‘Paris Pastry Guide.’ I sell it in ePub and mobi formats directly to the public and quickly sold 225 copies. I am very happy with Vook,” said Heather Stimmler-Hall.

Vook delivers a multitude of enhanced features to give eBook creators a superior experience. Some of the top line features include:

• File conversion - a thorny issue for publishers that Vook has worked hard to solve. The new platform converts files on the fly, while preserving a majority of style and text formatting.
• Innovative styling tools that allow publishers to take the look of an eBook from average and ordinary to extraordinary.
• Easy enhancements are core to Vook’s functionality. Vook is the leader in allowing users to easily add audio, videos and images to create enhanced eBooks.
• Real time title rendering lets you see your eBook with the styling you’ve created and applied, and watch your adjustments take effect in front of you.
• Distribution ready files produced for B&N, Amazon and the iBookstore along with many more etailers to come. Integrated epubcheck functionality makes sure files are bug-free.
• Instant eBooks - You want to start writing a book? Well, start actually writing a book. Vook lets you begin creating your content in the final form it’s going to take as a digital book.

Vook has signed on a series of powerful and influential partners to use its ePublishing platform including Franklin Covey and HayHouse. Sign up for the platform at Vook.com and we’ll contact you shortly.

We’re proud to announce the results of our Vook Creation Contest. Our team argued over their favorite picks all week—more than 500 titles were in consideration. The range of work shows what you + Vook can do! The winners will receive $1000 worth of Vook Marketing Promotion—and the overall winner also receives a free Vook account for a year.

Here are the winners in each of the three categories:

And the winners are…

Best Design:

Create: Transforming Stories of Art, Life & Faith

Publisher: The Grove Center for Center for the Arts & Media

This eBook is a feast for the eyes! Neatly arranged paragraphs of text frame gorgeous images of paintings and videos. Each chapter begins with a beautiful initial letter, set as a drop cap with text wrapping around it. This continues on the Bio page where all of the conrtibuting editors’ headshots are set within their bio paragraphs!

Best Content:

Pocket Stones: A World War II Childhood

Publisher: Hardboiled Industries

Pocket Stones is a collection of short stories about a young girl growing up in WW-II era Phillipines. Each story is a short gem of personal history mixed with world history, all written with a concise, light touch. We are proud to have helped such a great collection of stories appear as an eBook!

Best Overall:

Scam School: Volume 1

Publisher: Magician Brian Brushwood

Scam school is a phenomenal title that really stood out the moment we saw it. It pushes the eBook format to the max! Creators Brian Brushwood and Jonathan Tilton stopped at nothing to build a title perfectly suited for the medium. Scam school has it all: Thrilling content, videos, images (used to illustrate the text, but also for design flourishes), and audio tracks! The eBook also uses internal links to take the reader to an answers section where the tricks are revealed!

Thank you again to all who submitted, and to all of our users There will be many more chances to have your titles featured in the future!

Our platform’s a work in progress—and it always will be. The only technology that’s ever ‘done’ is a technology that’s obsolete (insert lazy joke about the printing press here).  As new file types (ePub3, KF8) emerge, we’ll be adapting Vook to produce them quickly, and we constantly adjust to keep track of changes and updates in devices and reader apps.

Everyday, our engineers push new code to our platform that improves the experience. But sometimes we have a bigger push than usual, with marked design changes, and we make sure to notify our users. Here’s a peek behind the curtain of Vook.com to show you some of the latest improvements to the platform.

Easier eProduction

We moved the Preview section over to the Build page. There’s no substitute for viewing your eBook on a device, and we want you to make sure you can quickly and easily see what you’re working on.

Location-Based Troubleshooting

Vook runs ePubcheck on your file and shows you exactly where the errors are in it. Custom code work or messy source files can both cause problems, but Vook makes it a snap to clean up any errors.

The Zen of Done

Creating final files is the last step. We’ve improved and streamlined the file creation page—and we can help you sell your eBook with Amazon, Apple, and Barnes & Noble.

Heather Stimmler Hall is a Vook tester who’s achieved our dream for the closed beta—she’s helped us improve the platform and produced an ebook she’s actually making money from.

Heather writes guidebooks to France, offers private tours of Paris and publishes travel guides. She runs the Website Secrets of Paris and has a devoted audience of followers. We interviewed Heather over Skype to learn more about her success writing, creating and selling eBooks directly with Vook.

Can you tell me about the project’s background?

I wanted to create an eBook out of an iPhone app that I did with David Lebovitz, called Paris Pastry Guide. Too many people don’t have an iPhone or iPad and can’t access apps. They want to know how they can have an eBook. But I didn’t have any fancy design program and I didn’t want it to look stupid, and I wanted to get it on the other markets like Amazon and iBooks.

So we used Vook. I have an iPhone and David has an iPad and we created the book and checked it out and used the online testers for the Mobi version. We sold it on our own Website, paris-pastry.com, for $2.99 for Valentine’s Day. We’ve sold 300 titles through our own site and 150 through the Kindle site. It will be in iBooks soon.

How has the process been selling it through your site?

I’m hoping we can maintain a consistent number—maybe 1,000 in the first month it’s out. Then maybe 20 or 30 a week. It’s selling more than the app version of the book.

The great thing about selling the eBook on your site is being able to go in and update the file and then immediately replace that file with the updated file, whereas going through Amazon and iTunes you have to resubmit everything.

The eBook is easier to fix. In our app, we can’t even fix a typo because since the app came out, Apple has gone to iOS5, which no longer allows offline content, which our app has. So if we take the app down just to change a typo, it won’t get accepted. We’re stuck with a choice of, do we leave the current app up there, or do we take it down and wait til we rebuild it?

Are there any hang ups with direct sales?

The only glitch is that selling it through my own site I have to do a back and forth to teach the readers how to load the file onto their device without going through a store.

The mobi file doesn’t have DRM, so it’s just a mobi file and it appears that if you put it on your own computer, and save it to your harddrive and then synch it to your device, it works fine. It only takes two seconds longer.

What mechanism do you use to sell your book directly?

I use a service called e-Junkie that emails them a link to download the book, but if they click on that link to open it instead of saving it, it doesn’t work. It’s just a raw file. You can’t just open the file. You have to open it in something else, but I explain that via email.

I have 10,000 subscribers to my newsletter, and David Lebovitz gets lots of traffic a day to his website. And most people will come right to our site and buy the book directly. It would be helpful to be able to sell automatically through the Web from Vook.

What do you think will make a difference to writers in digital?

I know a lot of writers who absolutely want to be able to sell their own content. Even those who don’t have a huge following, they still want to have the option to set up a Website and sell from it. Maybe it will make money, maybe it won’t. But it’s sort of free money.

Check out Heather’s eBook at her Website—and if you buy a copy, you’re not only learning about the culinary arts of France, you’re seeing first-hand what you can create with Vook. It’s a David Lebovitz book on pastry, it’s only 2.99, and it’s easy to read on any device, which makes it almost as irresistible as one of David’s petit-fours.

Books used to come off the printing press and anyone could pick them up and read them—the reader requirement was literacy. With digital, it’s different. You can’t read the book you’ve created or purchased until you have the right device to read it on. It’s a new layer of complication, even if it’s elegantly designed, between text and target.

Sure, there’s the excellent work of Scribd and other online reading services, but to pick up a flowable text ebook that works smoothly in mobile for the largest market of readers and charge them for it, you need to create customized files and go through a digital distributor.

The device limitations and file types means that distributors have the power in the digital world—publishers are making digital books, first and foremost, for distributor devices. All questions of design and reader experience have really come secondary to file limitations, something that obviously wasn’t an issue in real-world book production.

In digital publishing, everyone serves the device first.

The digital book world is a dream half realized. When digital books can reach readers as easily as handing off a physical book today, entirely new opportunities will open up for customer relationships, audience building, information sharing.

Smart players (take a look at what Mark Cuban’s done with the eBook produced through Vook) are moving fast to work with what’s possible now when it comes to expanding a book’s availability. Next week, I’ll be interviewing one of our users who’s already sold more than 300 copies of her Vook-created eBook directly to users on her Website. And that’s not a PDF, but a flowable text eBook file.

Digital books are still half realized as a medium, maybe even less than half realized. In the physical world, we already have the platonic form of the book—a near perfect object. If we could create that experience in the mundane world subject to so many physical laws, we should be able to pull off something just as impressive in the limitless reality of digital.