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  • Last Minute Manufacturing and Lin

    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!