So, you’ve written a great book. Now people will just automagically discover it and suddenly you’ll be a best selling author, right? Not surprisingly, it’s a bit more complicated than that. We wanted to give you a little advice, based on our experience working in digital publishing. Today, we’ll look at how to spread the word through social media. First of all, which networks should you be on? Most of our resources focus on Twitter and Facebook because that’s where Read more…
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 Read more…
People wax nostalgic about the smell of books, but no one pines for the smell of textbooks. They smelled like glue, they were heavy, and they were—usually—boring. So we were happy to read Apple’s announcement of iBooks 2 and iBooks Author: finally, a kind of book everyone wants to see go digital fast. It’s a great announcement for digital publishing, for readers, and for platform and tool creators like us. It also raises some interesting complications that we’ve spent months Read more…
Before posting more on cloud-based reading experiences, I wanted to give everyone a quick update on the Vook beta. Everyday, users are working in Vook and helping us identify issues we need to address. Our engineering queue is essentially a cue taken from our users — ha! (Like that? Wait til you read my Vook produced comic memoir!) Last week we fixed 48 issues that users caught — items ranging from Kindle file generation to adding the ability to delete projects. Read more…
If the printed word had brainstormed a go-to-market strategy to spread everywhere in the 16th century, it couldn’t have done better than violent religious controversy. Luther’s 95 Theses and the invention of the printing press dovetailed to create what the Economist recently described as an early example of a viral marketing campaign that spread the Reformation — and, by extension, print culture. The Economist is keen to highlight the similarities to social media (and multimedia content; woodcuts were the apps of the Read more…
I raved yesterday about going to the National Book Awards; now I’m trying to catch up on reading the winners I didn’t grab from our table display — and I’ve hit a problem. Only 3 of the 4 National Book Award winning titles are available as eBooks—Nikky Finney’s collection of poems Head Off & Split is not available digitally. Dianna Dilworth also sharply caught this at eBook Newser, and I wish it was more widely remarked. I run into this Read more…
Our digital publishing platform, VookMaker, is ever closer to public release — and our vision of an easy-to-use ebook creation, distribution and sales reporting platform. And yes! This is exciting, this platform we have developed. And yes! We are excited. But — a platform is only as good as what people make with it — which is why we’re even more excited that Apple recognizes the high quality, awesome looking eBooks VookMaker can produce. How do we know this? Because Read more…
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 more…
I am really excited here in Vook New York City as I start gearing up for Digital Book 2024 and Book Expo America next week — the largest trade show in North America, which is guaranteed to be a great time. Don’t be shy and make sure you stop by Kiosk 2311 in the Digital Zone to say “hi” and pick up some special download cards from me.
The success of our Video Guides demonstrated that readers were hungry (or thirsty, considering the speed “Cocktails” flies off the digital shelf) for original Vook material. So we’re excited to announce the launch of our next imprint of all new titles: TextVook. This new imprint features the worldly teachings of Dr. Vook Ph.D as he takes readers on an animated journey through history, science, philosophy—the entire world of learning. His first TextVook, “American History 101: The TextVook,” was released Friday Read more…
