A funny paradox of the eBook revolution — it’s easier than ever to create digital books, but frustratingly complex to share them and difficult for readers to actually read them without the right device or application. eBooks have turned books into pieces of software and publishers into software companies. The very smart Peter Brantley first articulated this distinction for me in an email remark, but it’s a concept — a new kind of category and role for book makers to Read more…
Today we opened Vook to the world, enabling anyone who visits our site to access our platform and create great looking eBooks, distribute them to the major marketplaces, and track their sales. Vook’s the product of heroic work from our design and engineering teams and voluminous and insightful input from hundreds of closed beta-users, whose feedback helped make the platform what it is today. Here’s a roundup of what the press has been saying: Publishers Weekly’s Craig Teicher: ”. . . Read more…
We missed a year of SXSW and the thing grew ten times in size. We hit town Sunday, March 11 to participate in NYTech Meetup’s Made in New York Event—and the few hours we spent outside of it was like visiting a tech Mardi Gras in the middle of Texas. Google and Blackberry houses had colonized the south of downtown, ringed by specialty food carts like chuckwagons. VCs and CFOs were giving presentations on budgets in dive bars a block Read more…
Everyone from the DOJ to Amazon.com is weighing in on the best way to price an eBook. It seems like a good time to bring up our eBook pricing whitepaper again; especially in light of us commenting in an MSNBC article on the DOJ investigation. Beyond the struggles between the big players, we wanted to highlight what we’ve learned publishing digital content and help you understand some ways you can think about pricing an ebook — or even just buying one. It’s all about the Read more…
When Jonathan Franzen bashed Twitter, he was just carrying on the relentless crusade he’s waging against the Internet and social media every time he steps up to a mic. He’s like a bookish, bizarro world Chuck D. — Black Steel Glasses in the Hour of Social Media Chaos. The outrage he’s kicked off makes him kind of the closest thing literature has to a bad boy though. From Michelle Houellebecq to Jonathan Littell to Jonathan Franzen, middle aged white guys Read more…
We launched bi-coastal in SF and NYC, but we’ve built so much of our ePublishing platform at our West 25th street office that we can say Vook is cloud-based but proudly New York made. And for a city-based tech-start up, there’s no better sign we’re officially in the game than having the New York Tech Meet-Up invite us to participate in their SXSW event, “Made In New York.” It’s like when the bartender down the street invites you to his Read more…
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 & Read more…
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 Read more…
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 Read more…
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 Read more…