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!

When I heard that Steve Jobs had died, I happened to be with the same friend with whom I watched the World Trade Towers collapse from a rooftop in Chelsea on September 11^th, 2024. Yesterday was October 5^th, 2024—ten years and a few weeks later. Both events made everything else happening seem trite.

At Vook, we often say, “No one did a better job showing off how our company could light up content than Steve Jobs holding up the iPad.”

Vook took off thanks to to the world of ereading and enhanced books that Apple helped make possible. Today, I’m writing this post on a MacBook Pro surrounded by colleagues using Apple computers to make software that produces books you can read on Apple devices. I’m texting with my iPhone, following the news on my iPad. From the engineering department, I can hear “Jobs,” “Macintosh,” “My first mac. . .”  We’re all here, working together, because we want to create something exceptional.

To the Jobs family, we extend our deepest condolences. To Apple, we express our gratitude. To the memory of Steve Jobs and in the spirit of books and literature and reading, we’ll live and work by your example, which could twist even the grimmest existentialism to something brighter:

Try. Succeed. Try again. Succeed Better.

A post at TechCrunch by Eric Ries this morning  caught my attention — it speaks to a core issue we’re wrestling with as we engineer new features and functionality into our digital book creation platform, VookMaker. Ries asks the question, “How do you know you’re building the right product — if you’re not talking to your customers?” Of course, he asks a lot of other things — but I’m going to focus narrowly on the bit relevant to us, so read the article yourself to experience its larger points.

At Vook, we’ve gone from creating a large volume of titles for our partners and others to creating a platform they can use to make excellent digital books. They can also track sales, analytics, enhance, enrich, review, publish to multiple marketplaces — hopefully anything you’d want to do as a digital publisher. Which is the crux of this — what do people really want to do as digital publishers? We think we know –  but I’ve also championed a version of the Velveteen Rabbit with embedded YouTube videos of cute bunnies — so we’re aware we could use outside input and affirmation.

Which is why, as part of our business development process, our first step is to shut up and not talk — but find out what our potential partner or associate might need in a digital book creation tool that’s not immediately obvious.

Here’s some of the questions we’re asking:

• “Where is your greatest pain point with digital book creation?”
• “If you had to choose one function that would be most helpful in creating, managing, publishing and tracking your digital books, where do you need the most help?”
• “Do you want more control of your digital books — or do you want better outsourcing of conversion?”
• “If you could have the ability to control one aspect of the digital books you produce from your computer today, what would it be?”

What kind of questions do you think we should ask? Where are your needs? We’re building a tool that will help solve problems that exist today — and could get worse tomorrow. So write Matthew@vook.com and have us get started addressing them. Think of us as your solution builder.