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 Read more…
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 Read more…
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 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…
I read Jonathan Franzen’s attack on ebooks with that pained internal wince I experience when a friend I respect dislikes an off-beat movie I thought was fantastic. Of course, Franzen’s not knocking one book or movie or thing but an entire technology I’m invested in — which makes the incident a little more piercing. In his comments at the Hay Festival in Colombia, Franzen seems to be opposing ebooks on the basis they’re ephemeral and easily tampered with—let’s say temptingly Read more…
Digital Book World 2024 marked our third visit to the conference and our second time with a booth and a banner and a strong company presence. We spoke on panels, live demoed the platform twice (creating a styled eBook in just over five minutes), and had the usual variety of encouraging meetings, new connections and oddball observations—most notably the impressive quality of distribution company representative’s side projects. I’ve long had Scott Simpson’s Twitter stream and blog bookmarked, this year I learned Kobo’s Read more…
Watch the Vook video! We demo’d our platform today at DBW (without a hiccup!) and fielded lots of curious eBook creation questions at our booth. For everyone who couldn’t be at the event, please check out this video. We’re launching it in honor of of our DBW appearance. It gives you the complete picture of what’s in the works at Vook.
Apple’s iBooks 2 and iBooks Author announcement ahead of next week’s Digital Book World lit up eBook discussions like a bonfire of paper books or, you know, End User License Agreements—which is exactly what many commenters seemed to want to make of Apple’s EULA for iBooks Author, which requires books created with the application to be sold exclusively through iBooks. EULA brouhaha aside — Apple’s an innovative company, a valued distribution partner and we think they’ve made a sharp tool. 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…