Faced with overwhelming demand, we’re closing the Vook beta to additional registrants on December 9^th. After December 9^th, you’ll still be able to sign up on our page to learn more about Vook—but we’ve rocketed past our goal of collecting an innovative group who can start working in the platform early.

In the coming weeks, expect to see more titles produced with Vook appearing in the marketplace. Mark Cuban’s recent ebook – proudly made in hours on the Vook platform – and History Channel’s Swampsgiving are a few examples of the kind of high quality work you can make using Vook, without knowing any code.

All of us at Vook continue to use and test the platform daily, creating and styling and producing eBook files. We’ll continue to regularly update our audience on what we’re learning and the capabilities of our platform – and share some of the interesting titles we’re creating. The wave of interest in our beta has been exciting for everyone on our team. We know we’re building a platform that corresponds with a precise need in the market.

Keep watching the blog for additional Vook updates. And if you have any friends who haven’t signed up for a beta account yet, make sure they get in before Friday.

As he probably did for many, T.S. Elliot inspired my love for poetry. Reading him twenty five years after struggling through the Wasteland in my parent’s copy of the Norton Anthology, I have new insight into his appeal. While some poets wrote about love or abstract art or the will or nature or romanticism, Eliot articulated a sensation everybody knows: Utter despair in the face of boredom. Before the oppressive office cubicle existed, Eliot wrote poems that instantly transported you into one that did not have an exit and was made of gray carpet.

What does this have to do with digital publishing? Well — it’s the medium. Poetry can’t be rendered differently to make it more itself, but our reactions to it can be so varied they require other media to express. What Elliot’s poetry has made me feel I’ve always described as, “the feeling you get when you hear Eliot read it.”

Eliot made a few recordings of the Wasteland. His voice is thin, reedy, and forlorn sounding. He puts a wistfulness into the recording that reinforces its melancholy. Ever since, I’ve read the Wasteland in Eliot’s voice in my head—which makes lines such as “we stopped in the colonnade/And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten./ And drank coffee, and talked for an hour” sound like a pessimist’s summary of the emptiness of life.

I’ve always wanted to express this feeling to others and now I’m able to realize my dream with Vook: I’ve embedded audio of Elliot reading the Wasteland into an ePub of the poem, creating a read-along Wasteland experience in just a few minutes.

With Vook, it’s easy to create audio and video enhanced eBooks—which means you can spread your vision of literary despair far and wide, and finally share the little voice in your head with everyone else in the world.

See what I’m talking about: Get the free ePub here.

Yesterday I was thinking about books in video games, today I’m reading about books in books, how we make books, how some people write them. The book in question: Vanity Fair’s How A Book is Born: The Making of The Art of Fielding, by Keith Gessen.

If the title looks unwieldly, for an eBook it’s aces. With digital, only a limited number of words show up on a reader’s screen, in a storefront or in a search result. Putting Vanity Fair first plays to the most eye-catching brand association, while the descriptive title is intriguing and straight forward. As for the aesthetic of the image itself, the cover shows up excellently in the Kindle Singles store. It looks sharp and eye-catching and authoritative; which can be difficult to pull off with digital’s little pixels.

The single’s about how Gessen’s friend, Chad Harbach, wrote this year’s literary hit the Art of Fielding, the book’s arduous path to publication and how it was sold to the public. It reads like one of those John McPhee essays on river barges or the nation of Switzerland—focused on detail, skill and method, with an eye for the characters who have an expertise in each step of the narrative. As for the book within a book, the Art of Fielding contains segments from a fictional philosphical guide of the same name. So Gessen’s writing a magazine piece that’s become a book about how a book with a book inside of it is turned into an actual, physical, real book; and what that process might be like in the future.

Anyone interested in digital publishing should read the essay and the novel—for my tl;dr blog take I want to point out what a particularly sharp example of digital publishing this is. Gessen’s essay on books is now a book I’m reading and enjoying just as I do Michael Lewis’s Boomerang.  It’s rich, smart, and absolutely worth what I would pay to watch an episode of the Office on iTunes.

Vanity Fair is setting an example for magazine publishing about how to turn great stories into items you can sell. Magazines seem to be so focused on the app environment, but that’s not the only solution. Other magazines have published Kindle Singles, but this particularly self-reflexive exercise, complete with clever branding, is a best-in-class example. It points the way to the future. One could say it lets the path of publishing become its own path — to manglingly appropriate Harbach.  Apps are pretty and gorgeous and Newsstand is an excellent innovation. But don’t forget what Graydon Carter writes in his introduction, “What doesn’t appear to be up for grabs are the old-fashioned virtues of craft and quality. They still count for something. Actually, they count for everything.”

eBooks may lack the gee-whiz of apps—but they put the craft and quality and fineness of words first. As an eBook, Gessen’s essay is now something I can pay for. It’s a product. It does what Gessen makes clear books have to do: generate revenue. If John Locke is making a living selling well done thrillers at 99 cents, there’s no reason others can’t take a stab at paying the rent with bookish essays on the crannies and complications of culture.

A note to Gessen though—Carter’s listed as the author in my Kindle Reader. This is truly exceptional clever branding.

Buy the single here.

For those of you who aren’t gamers or don’t keep reddit open in a browser tab, Game of Thrones isn’t the only property turning television screens into Scandanvian Renaissance Festivals. Video game company Bethesda Software recently released Skyrim, an incredibly detailed, open world role playing game that shipped 3.4 million copies in 2 days and scored a 96 point overall average on review aggregator Metacritic.

It’s a definite blockbuster hit, but is it another reason for fantasy lovers to turn away from literature? Hardly. Skyrim’s littered with books — from romance novels to religious books to spell tomes to journals to straight fiction. You can pick up books, carry them around, deposit them in your house and read them in-game, paging through what’s estimated to be a thousand plus pages of actual text.  It’s that weird, possibly too potent perfect time-suck — a fantasy video game stocked with fantasy books that you read as a fantasy character you created.

Of course, it’s a self-limiting audience—even if we’re living post triumph of the nerds, most people are still adopting to digital books instead of actually fantastical digital books. But it’s interesting that Skyrim’s developers saw the potential to populate their world with books — a real life case of transmedia storytelling that doesn’t feel tacked on, but natural, even necessary.

Just a few days ago, I was discussing at Vook how video game companies – like Bethesda – could use Vook to produce eBook versions of their in-game lore. Sure, the audience is niche, but it’s an audience that’s committed. And when you make it as easy to create an eBook as Vook does, why would you skip the opportunity?

That’s the future of publishing. Or at least one path of the future. Companies who have rich, deep, intricate stories that don’t exist in “real-world” book form will start producing books independently. And if they have an audience they can reach digitally — they have a bookstore too.

We’re not the only ones with the idea. Metafilter today alerted me that the blogger behind capane.us had turned all of Skyrim’s in-game books into actual eBooks for the Mobi and ePub format.

It should send a message to video game and media companies everywhere: If your own users are hacking your content into book format, shouldn’t you put them together yourself? Email us at Vook today at [email protected]. Or just hang tight — we’ll be knocking on your door soon.

Everyday we get requests from people who want to build an eBook with Vook immediately. Everyday we look at what we’re building, what our users want and expect, and what we’ve committed to delivering. Our engineering team is working night and day (which isn’t hyperbole, I’ve interrupted them at 2 AM on our conference line in the past)—and the rest of us are constantly using and testing Vook, making sure it meets our standards.

On Thanksgiving, I’m not grateful for the elements we can control – our commitment, our resourcefulness, our smarts – I’m grateful for that harder to hit factor: What people want and what we’re building seem perfectly aligned.

I’m judging that interest by how many people sign up every day for our beta – and anecdotally by how many people have emailed me on Thanksgiving asking if they can use the platform while they have time off.

And we will ship to our beta users very soon. But today I wanted to share a segment of a clip I found on the Next Web’s Shareables site—a video of Steve Jobs brainstorming with the team at NeXT in the 80s about when they’re going to release their product.

Steve Jobs and NeXT UPDATE: You’ll want to start watching at the 8:00 minute mark for the relevant section.

The part I’m focused on starts 8:00 minutes into the video, during a brainstorm/debate/conversation between Steve and the team members, ranging from Product to Tech to Business. I’m not highlighting this clip to swoon over Job’s exceptionalism—but because it clearly shows how product innovation, consumer demands and the abilities of technology interact with and react to each other.

My favorite part? When Steve, slightly exasperated, says, “I can’t change the world.” Many people would consider that ironic – but I think Steve’s right. This clip shows it’s commitment,  intensity, and smart people pushing each other that make a difference.

Steve might have said, “I can’t change the world – but my company can.” And that’s the truth.

While most of New York was sleeping off Saturday night this past Sunday morning, Vook was answering a call from Diversion Books.

Diversion had an issue. They’d been working with billionaire businessman, investor and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban to produce an eBook out of his blog content. But they had a sudden deadline: 5 AM Monday morning.

In the past, having to produce an eBook in hours and distribute it to the marketplaces would have required someone building the file, testing it, and then creating the right output formats. Diversion might have been out of luck.

But Diversion’s Scott Waxman has been working with Vook since our launch. He knew what our platform could do and made the call for help. We were able to get Diversion logged in, set up with an account, and hours later, presto!, they had a finished, sharp-looking eBook they were uploading to the markets.

The next morning, Mark Cuban had an eBook for sale and Jeffrey Trachtenberg had an article on Cuban’s groundbreaking publishing effort in the WSJ.

We couldn’t have asked for a better book, author, and publishing company for a gotcha test of Vook. And it worked. In fact, it’s the first eBook someone else has built and put on sale using Vook. We’re thrilled to be making the formerly impossible, or at least ridiculously difficult, possible — and maybe even pleasant.

Get the Cuban eBook — and see what you can build with Vook for yourself. And sign up for the beta at Vook.com!

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 issue when I’m trying to get more obscure titles — but I’m a book nerd and I can live with my tastes being off beat and not always digitally available. But this seems an oversight that’s bigger than my interests.

Head Off & Split is a National Book Award Winner. And yes, I know, I can get it at a bookstore and support my local independent, but I like supporting the new digital publishing start-ups, and I don’t like going back to print. So, I want this in digital.

Which is why, because our platform’s so easy to use, if publisher Triquarterly or Nikky or anyone associated with this project would just send me the manuscript –just send me a word document! or paste it into an email! — I’ll produce a high end, nicely formatted flowable eBook for them in a few days, for free. I’ll do it myself. Again, for free.

I’ll even type the book into our tool if that’s what it takes—if they ok it.

Just someone, let me know. For my own sake. And note that this is an encouraging sign for 2026–you’ve got someone pleading to read a book of poetry as an eBook. Viva culture.

Matthew Cavnar

[email protected]

Vook

Representing Vook at the National Book Awards last night, I found myself sharing a table with Susan Minot, Calvin Trillin, Francine du Plexis Grey, Rachel Cobb, Morgan Entrekin and Elisabeth Schmitz.  If you enter those names into Google at once, the first result is the all caps phrase “EXCLAMATION POINT CLOSE QUOTE”—which about replicates how the experience felt, i.e. so thrilling it was constantly being shouted over the phone by my brain’s old-timey newsman.

We were one table from the stage — close enough I could pretend John Ashberry was speaking directly to me. When you’re listening to one of America’s greatest poets and Susan Minot is taking notes, you know Something. Is. Happening.

John Ashberry

The experience was lovely, the speeches moving, the room impressive. Walking to Cipriani’s, I passed Zucotti Park, where Occupy Wall Street was regrouping in the rain. Halfway through the ceremony, I realized that if you transported the protestors to the restaurant they’d probably agree — the magisterial environment fit the event, materialism doing its best to honor literature’s accomplishments of the spirit. Bankers and anarchists alike, I think, would recongize the values these awards revere.

I and Vook were proud to be a part of the occasion.

The other day someone asked, “What do you think digital publishing’s going to look like in six months?” I said, “Everyone’s going to be doing it.” Media companies, news organizations, movie studios, record labels—digital book production’s going to be as expected as a social media presence. The Guardian, Huffington Post, and the Wall Street Journal already publish their own books—today the L.A. Times released its first title, “A Nightmare Made Real” by reporter Christopher Goffard.

The book’s a Kindle, iBooks, and BN digital short, selling at 99 cents. I purchased it for the Kindle App for iPad and read it on a subway ride from Soho to Carrol Gardens, about 15 minutes. It documents the accusation against Louis Gonzalez III that he kidnapped and sexually assaulted Tracy West, the estranged mother of his son. The facts proved Gonzalez innocent, the evidence suggests West fabricated everything. The book moves along tersely with nice flourishes, such as describing how Gonzales now stares every security camera in the face. He’s constantly looking for third-party confirmation of what he’s doing, in case nobody believes him later.

Goffard originally wrote the story as a two-part piece for the Times this summer. The book enlarges on that, pulls the pieces together, gives the author room to expand. Goffard mentions Kafka twice, and the  story-as-parable stands out in eBook format.

As a book, it works. But there are some lessons for digital publishing.

Discovery: Without following links from press announcements, the book’s hard to find. Search L.A. Times in Amazon and iBooks and you get some Stuart Woods thrillers. I don’t remember the name of the defendant or the accuser and I’m not going to remember the book’s title. As a user, I had a hard time finding the book without help. The L.A. Times needs a landing page for their title, like what Google did for the ZMOT we produced together. And they need it tagged right. Search ‘L.A. Times book’ on Google now and you get their book section.

Cover: If Luis Sinco is on staff, the L.A. Times could get a more iconic image for their first book. Not to knock the photograph, but it’s more of an image sliver than anything that makes an impression. Beyond that, I can’t make out the cover clearly in the digital storefronts. The book needs clean design, and one sharp image. In digital marketplaces, the title always lives next to the cover so you don’t need to worry about cramming everything text-wise onto the face of a jpeg.

Enhancements: Maybe not worth the effort, but the little images affixed at the top of a few chapters could be more nicely integrated. They could add audio clips. It could be interesting if the book ended with a 10 second clip of Gonzales staring into some 7-11’s security camera.

It’s mostly marketplace elements you wish the Times did a little better. And no blame on them, this is a new type of product. The book’s good reporting, in a great format, and it was absolutely easy to dig into and read straight through. It was a way better experience than reading it on a Web page, or on a Web browser saved for later on my iPad.

Good for the L.A. Times for getting this released. With a few more tweaks, we could start seeing “must-book-ify” opportunities become “must-reads” and get the attention the writing and narrative are worth.

Reading Gregory Cowles’ review of [Sic], a memoir by the composer Joshua Cody concerning his experience with cancer, chemo, cocaine, destructive relationships and insanity, I was pleasantly struck by two observations—1) that Cowles describes Cody, at 34, as a “young” composer and 2) that Cowles wished, “the book came embedded with MP3s in addition to its photos and paintings and scrap-paper notes.”

With his sympathetic view of multi-media and youth, Cowles is my kind of reviewer — I was about to knock out an MP3 embedded version of [Sic]’s first chapter on Vook to get his attention before realizing that would be inappropriate, having permission from nobody and lacking the will to transcribe a chapter and embed a Cody clip just to show Cowles how quickly we can gild the lilly. Cowles wouldn’t know anyway, unless I video taped the thirty minute process of doing it — which would look more obsessive than impressive.

“Gilding the lilly” isn’t a phrase I should use. ‘Lily gild’ is a grace note, enhancements can be essential. Our tool’s about making great looking eBooks, but when items like Cowles’ appear, or Diana Spiotta talks about film clips that could show up in Stone Arabia or I’m reading I Want My MTV and wondering what they’re talking about, it’s difficult not to think of what could be.

People talk about the expense of enhanced, the time, the uncertainty if reader’s want the additions, but applying the rule of my own experience before we had Vook’s platform, I wonder how much is that it’s difficult. Enhancing eBooks takes time. Enhanced has been getting a poor notice creatively, on the other hand, it’s been too laborious a process and too complicated. There’s uncertainty–is it worth the time it takes to get it right?

I used to edit film. A difference of a few frames could be crucial. One version was right, the other wrong. It made me think of the Platnoic ideal, that information and narrative had a perfect form, like Plato said chairs did. It didn’t seem like subtle editing distinctions would matter, but then they did.

The only way to get film or writing to the right point is to shorten the distance between the creator and what they’re fiddling with. You have to be able to fiddle to the point of getting it acceptably-not-perfect. That can be tricky for the creatives who want to write books and, oh, add enhancements? Sure . . . but they don’t know HTML or how to create an ePub.

So, enter Vook. So, easy audio and video additions. So, my wish that though we’re making a platform to create beautiful straight ebooks, everyone will come looking for what Gregory Cowles is talking about.

And just a note — Cody’s music is hard to locate. I think this video on YouTube for Animal Kingdom (the crime movie, not something Geographical) represents it. Though it does demonstrate Cowles is wrong on one point — the music’s not jazzy, but long and a little mournful. It would be a perfect downbeat counterpoint to a clip of Cody explaining, as he mentions in the book, how to pronounce his name right.