Our friends at CodeMeetPrint alerted us to an announcement that Amazon will be distributing the Queen’s Christmas address as a free Kindle eBook on December 25^th.

Thanks to a Wodehouse inspired youthful Anglophilia, I’m a casual fan of the royal holiday address, most particularly George’s VI’s eve-of-WWII 1939 broadcast which he concluded with the quote, “I said to the man who stood at the Gate of the Year / Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown. . .” (always gives  a chill) – but for Vook, Amazon’s plan to release the eBook version is bigger than the Royal Family.

The bookification of the Queen’s speech is a royal-crest-in-the-ground and rampant flag for why eBooks will become such a prevalent content form in 2026 and beyond.

eBooks ship fast. You can create and inticingly package content like the Queen’s speech—and deliver it the same day. It’s what we’ve been saying for months, highlighting efforts like the LAT and NYT’s eBooks, free eBooks from daily email businesses and Vanity’s Fair titles. Now the Queen’s onboard: In 2026, everything can be an eBook. They’re the information rich packaged Web pages of the future — only easier to read on mobile devices.

And Vook’s going to be the Dreamweaver of eBooks — the interface that lets you make better and better experiences.

Here’s proof. While I’ll happily download Amazon’s speech eBook, I wish I could read it with the video or audio of the address included. It’s not like it’s hard to do — I just made my own eBook of the Queen’s first televised speech in 1957, and included the video. Consider it a holiday present from Vook—and a demonstration of where eBooks are going next year.

CLICK HERE TO GET THE EBOOK EPUB FILE.

If you click this link on your iOS device or Color Nook, the eBook will automatically download and open in your iBooks or Nook reader.

And for all of you who are or who want to create eBooks, may Vook be your code-free WISYWIG light in 2026 to guide you through the unknown of div classes, page breaks, ePub 3 and KF8!

I’ve been a long-time subscriber to food culture daily email Tasting Table (I think I was getting the test-sends) so I’m pleased to see their editorial team produce eBooks as expertly as they do short form emails – it’s like they’re now offering Lobster Thermidor in addition to excellent lobster rolls.

Their most recent eBook — the Sous Chef Series 2026 Recipe Collection — features 12 dishes from established chefs across the country, including the Slanted Door and Blue Hill. It’s a gorgeous title rendered in fixed lay-out for iOS devices and as a PDF. Design aside, it’s a great example of how non-traditional publishers can exploit the new medium of digital books, shipping product efficiently and at a lower cost without sacrificing aesthetics.

We saw three key lessons.

1) Existing Audience

TastingTable has an existing audience in their email subscriber list. Providing them additional value in the form of digital books inspires reader loyalty and establishes a brand, but it also means the book is more likely to be adopted — its audience is eagerly awaiting new content from the creators.

2) Excellent Content = Wider Appeal

The core audience will drive early adoption of the title. Strong content will then inspire strong reviews, encouraging others to try the book. Because you can insert links in digital books, TT can upsell readers to sign up for the email with a non-intrusive, editorially savvy, in-book call-to-action.

3) Strategic Pricing

Crucially, TT has made their eBooks free. They could drive revenue by selling these titles, but the company’s core business is email. Making the book free to drive more downloads, expand the brand, and reach new marketplaces and potential subscribers is a savvy move.

Tasting Table’s books are ePublishing-as-marketing done right.  It’s a great example for Web, media, news and other companies to consider when they’re thinking about approaches to digital publishing.

And the Autumn Whiskey Sour is a must try.

What is it with our Nicholas Carr fixation? Authors take note  –  mention us in print and you’re guaranteed Vook blog coverage. Today, I want to call your attention to a piece Mr. Carr wrote for the Nieman Journalism Lab on the coming appification of content. Carr’s predicting that newspapers in 2026 will monetize and engage readers increasingly through apps. It’s an area we’ve been thinking about as we find more and more content holders getting interested in eBooks.

Mr. Carr’s piece offers an apparently safe thesis—newspapers have profited from great apps. But when it comes to content delivery, the details are thorny.

Carr writes, “What’s an app store but a series of paywalls?” Well, it’s also, crucially, a marketplace you can only tap with the help of developers and one that imposes checkpoints and tech requirements that can be difficult to accomodate. Essentially:

1. A native app is expensive to build – if you really want to get it right
2. Content updating in apps can be difficult to maintain through a CMS
3. Updating and version changes = major headaches

CMS solutions for appstore delivery exist — and we love the work from Mag+, Adobe and others — and it does seem many newspapers already have an app. But production difficulties aside, the appstore also represents the centraliziation and primacy of a few big brands. A good example might be apps for local public radio stations  – many NPR and PRI affiliates have an app, but after my cursory survey of a selection, I’d be  surprised if any of them, or even all of them combined, approached the traction of the excellent NPR flagship app.

Jason Baptiste at OnSwipe would probably say we’re being too moderate in our perspective, but HTML 5 Web experiences also have a ways to go. They remain slow, clunky to load, and it can be hard for them to handle more complicated content.

So is there a solution? Probably long term a Web-based experience independent of native app confines — like Baptiste’s OnSwipe. In the interim, newspapers and news related content holders should look at monetizing their content across a spectrum of platforms, including eBooks.

Appification is going to help, but it’s still a hard way to make money (see: the Daily). The Project Triangle states that of the qualities Fast, Cheap and Good you must pick two. I’d tweak it and say the App Project Triangle is Slow, Expensive and Good. If you want Good, you pretty much have to take the other two as well.

If Christopher Hitchens is wrong about the non-existence of a soul, he and Vaclav Havel must be giving Kim Jong Il a drubbing in whatever forum the afterlife offers political brawlers. While we’d expect Havel and Hitchens to eventually win a war of words, perhaps, in the long stretches of eternity, the three can find common ground by trading essays for peer review. Like Havel and Hitchens, Kim Jong Il had a literary ouevre too.

Both GalleyCat and the BBC today called attention to some of Kim Jong Il’s film criticism, but no one’s yet released a more comprehensive picture of the dear leader as dear author.

But! You no longer have to wait! We used the Vook platform to put together a collection of 6 of Kim’s essays and his official state biography.

It’s a stylized eBook spin through Kim’s penetrating insights into the Juche, finding harmony with the working class and struggling against the forces of capitalist imperialism; as well as some occasional pieces of film and literary criticism.

You might have thought the looming shadow of Kim’s threat was confined to North Korea and now extinct — but, with this special ebook, the long hand of potentially assigned, fairly impenetrable idelogical reading is reaching out for you and/or your school-age relatives.

Enjoy! GET THE BOOK BY CLICKING HERE.

If you open this link on your iOS or Color Nook browser, you will download the file directly to your reader software, and will be able to read this work immediately.

I was surprised and deeply saddened to learn of Christopher Hitchens’ death this morning. I’d known he was sick but hadn’t known his health was so poor. I hadn’t read Hitch 22, hadn’t read his more recent essays. I wanted to read them while he was still living, before he became his admirers.

Now he’s gone. The first eulogy  I read was Graydon Carter’s, then the piece from Christopher’s brother, Peter Hitchens. Powerful reflections both. Others soon followed.

In honor of his passing, I pulled together six of the most moving eulogies I found on the Internet and added a video of Hitchens discussing death and the fear of death. The work is the work of others — think of it as a more carefully laid out and curated collection of links for you to read and reflect on in an easily portable format.

To download the file, click on this link.

If you click on this link through the Web browser on your iPad or iPhone, you will be able to open the book directly in iBooks. If you click on the link with your Color Nook browser, you will be able to read the book on your Color Nook.

The book is fully video enabled.

I made it in about half an hour. Hitchens could write a stellar piece in less time. He is and will be missed.

GET THE BOOK HERE.

We began onramping beta users on Tuesday—and the turn-out for online training reminds us of the end of “Ghostbusters.” We thought we had a lot of demand, but we were still surprised when a Mr. Staypuff sized colossus suddenly materialized.

But it did. And we’re kind of awed. Our users are hungry to make books. We’re moving fast to meet the demand. We’re instructing registrants in groups, walking them through the platform, then handing over the keys so they can build their own titles.

Want more evidence? Our company is growing to help us extend Vook far and wide. We’re hiring!

Specifically, we’re hiring a Lead Generation Marketing Manager and a Head of Sales. I’m not going to post the entire spec here — too much space — but click on either job title and you’ll see the requirements.

The early user feedback is confirming that we’re building something people need. Expect to see examples of user created books soon. And if you’re not in the beta, get ready to start creating your own books directly after that.

We opened Vook to our first group of beta users today. We trained the early adopters in online sessions, fielded questions, and handed over accounts.

The first eBooks produced independently with the new Vook are now rolling off the digital press!

It’s a big moment for the company — and it’s got us looking back on our precursors.

The first typographic printed books — produced with Gutenberg’s moveable type press — were called incanabula; which means, ‘the first infancy of printing.’

But even with the form in its infancy, those early publishers produced some 15 million volumes before 1500. People were more concerned with the plague than content commidification in the 16^th century, but it’s evidence: Human beings are going to publish as many titles as they possibly can if they have a way to do it easily.

Ebooks are the publishing medium of our time. And they’re in their incanabula. Our titles, with customized images, styled formating, and audio and video enhancements, are the modern equivalent of medieval woodcut illustrations.

Whether it’s the 16^th century or today, people want to make distinct, powerful looking titles. They wanted styled books.

If he was transported to our time, a Gutenberg foreman might mistake Vook for sorcery. But once we started discussing typography, ledding and image manipulation, he’d understand that however much the world changes, people will always want to make better books.

It’s a grand tradition — everyone using Vook to produce great digital books is now a part of it.

Turning an unknown author into a surprise bestseller is publishing at its finest—and a classic example of old fashioned interupption marketing.

The author toils in obscurity for years and emerges with a work that transfixes an audience that hadn’t previously existed.

That’s art. Great art, more often than not, finds an audience (even great-but-completely-insane art, a la Henry Darger). But it’s a hard task. You’re convincing people to pay attention to something new.

Stephen Elliot, who often reflects on art vs. commerce, being read vs. not being read, remarked that anyone is lucky their work’s read. No one owes you a reading.

Artists don’t build audiences. They make art. That art makes an audience, or it disappears. Or it disappears and returns a hundred years later, when its audience arrives.

But here’s the good news: Not everyone is an artist. Most people aren’t.

Which is excellent.

If you’re not an artist; if you’re a company or a Website or a person who works for a Website or runs a Website—if you’re anyone who has an audience: You’re already lucky.

You already have readers.

You don’t have to produce a stunning piece of art they never knew they needed.

You just have to give them what they come to you for — whether it be expertise on model train collecting or interior decorating— in an intelligent, thoughtful and well packaged format.

Give it to them in a digital book. That looks great. That reads cleanly. That shows what you do at your best.

Make it easy to buy on your Website. Offer the first one, two, three, even five eBooks for free.

More and more readers are carrying tablets — and tablets are just book covers that you can beam any kind of book into.

People want to beam in what they’re familiar with. If you’ve already done all the hard work of building a Website or a business or a brand, you’re lucky.

Dostoevsky remembered being told his first novel was accepted for publication as the finest moment in his life. The world probably didn’t know it wanted to read thousands of pages about the internal life of deeply troubled slavs. But apparently we did!

You don’t have to suffer to share your vision with the world. If you’ve got a Website with traffic, you know what people want.

Now all you have to do is write the book.

Your audience is waiting.

When I present Vook to people who can take advantage of it – anyone with content and an audience, basically – I like to stress three key things you can do with the platform:

Productize your content

Ship eBooks fast

Reach the booming marketplace of digital readers

When you’re working at speed, you can achieve all three in the same day. We call it Extreme Publishing; more formally, Last Minute Book Manufacturing—it’s what Diversion Books experienced when they built Mark Cuban’s eBook in less than a day on Vook.

And Vook eBooks aren’t mass produced. They reflect the unique customization you can apply with our in-tool styler.

But whatever your eBook looks like, you have to ship or sink. And you can ship eBooks fast.

Getting your content into the hands of a paying audience is the goal of publishing. Great text content is great text content whether it’s presented in the form of an elaborate app with words that turn into monsters or an eBook where you can flip pages and change fonts.

Apps are lovely. But it’s hard to ship apps. There’s the creation process, the design process, the submission process, the updating process, the user expectation — the expense of all of that.

If you have a tool that lets you create great looking eBooks fast, you can dodge those headaches and still make the best content on the market.

If you have a Website with consistent traffic, you have a bookstore.

If you have a Webite with fantastic content people read, you have potential books.

If you’re the kind of person or company that’s built either of those, you’re probably the kind of person or company who can make exceptional books.

With eBooks, you can launch a thousand ships in the time it takes to build one cruise ship app. With our styling tool, those thousand ships can look pretty great—even if they don’t have pools or Cirque Du Sole shows in the main dining room every night.

But yachts are fast. And effective. And you use them to win races.

Tl;dr: Shipping metaphors run amok, blog post runs forever, eBooks will help you win the race to make and release great content

Last night I attended CodeMeetPrint at General Assembly where Findings, Projeqt, Urtak and MagAppZine (now MAZ) presented and sat for a Q&A. The last time I was at General Assembly for a presentation, Steve Jobs died—so happily this time I remember the products and the entrepreneurs. Here’s a wrap-up of what we saw. The pitch lines are mine, and definitely not company endorsed.

Findings:

Like Instapaper meets highlighting in Kindle

I’ve liked this company for a while. They allow you to highlight and save your favorite quotes in Kindle books and on the Web. You can collect and share key excerpts. It takes the Kindle highlighter feature that next important  step. A quietly innovative and valuable service; exactly what you’d expect from a Betaworks company.

MagAppZine:

Apple Newsstand apps with no coding required

The presentation highlight was founder Paul Canetti revealing he landed beta clients by cold-calling 100 magazine companies – technology is crucial but that commitment makes a businesse successful. MAZ (Canetti announced the rename that night) has an easy to use tool for app publishing through Newsstand that incorporates PDFs into an iOS container. The PDFs can also be enhanced with rich media links.

Urtak:

Two men’s epic battle against Internet commenters, waged through Platonic dialogue

Urtak’s co-founder Marc Lizoain shaped his presentation more as a jeremiad against Internet commenters. You can read his take in this article, but what’s impressive is the solution Urtak’s built for better communication on blogs and the Web—a Yes/No Question & Answer widget that shows high engagement rates that won’t dissolve into flame wars.

Projeqt:

The Power Point killer app

An initiative from TBWA, Projeqt has more institutional heft behind it – and they’ve used their resources to craft a beautiful and engaging new way to create and share presentations. It could be a Web-app power point killer, it could be a Web-app HTML 5 book app killer. I didn’t realize til halfway through the presentation that the slides I thought were a gorgeous lead up to the product demo were in fact the product demo in action. It looks like a way anyone could create an excellent Web reading experience right now. I might be missing something, but this one feels pretty revolutionary.