Blog

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 ...

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 ...

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 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 ...

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” ...

The Vook team -- + friends and family -- pounded on the Vook platform over the last two days, searching high and low for bugs, defects and sloppy user experiences. This is our second internal attempt at breaking the system ...

We sent an update about Vook to our beta registrants yesterday (hi, all of you!) and the response was overwhellming. People are excited about getting into the platform! And we're excited to give it to you! I'm getting back to ...

While listening to an audiobook version of Nicholas Carr's The Shallows, our engineer Amanuel was surprised to hear Carr discuss Simon & Schuster’s creation of “vooks”. I'm familiar with Carr’s proposition that the Internet may be dimming our cognition, wrecking ...

We were in San Francisco on Wednesday for the eBooks for Everyone Else conference from Publisher’s Launch. My laptop ran the under-cover beta of our platform for attendees — which might have distressed our engineers (hi guys!) but, as I ...

I'm a big fan of Creepypastas -- weird little stories that float around the Internet, some fake, some naive, some unnervingly real. I posted about the ARG and YouTube video series Marble Hornets in 2024, lamenting that you couldn't read ...

We've been working hard to find solutions for many of the common errors that mar today's eBooks. High profile examples such as the recent errors in the Steve Jobs biography and in Neal Stephenson's Reamde have called more attention to ...

We tasted our own cooking at Vook on Wednesday. Each and every employee spent the day with the new Vook platform, creating their own eBooks. Wow, what fun! The purpose was four fold: 1. A bug tracking contest. Awards and ...

From formatting errors to styling challenges to distribution woes (oh my!), eBook-making can be challenging. Although our tool makes it easy to design your eBook by dragging-and-dropping, Vook knows that what eBook makers really need is a community that will ...

Video games have supposedly lost their nerdy stigma, (thanks to Rockstar and Angry Birds and the Wii yes, but you can’t anticipate $70 billion in revenue by 2024 and not look a little grown up) but I still find myself ...

A friend introduced me to a new service called Reading. They bill themselves as: "What you're reading. Not what you like. Not what you find interesting. Just what you're reading." A kind of taunting little company description, but I like ...

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="225" caption="Kindle Format 8 in action"][/caption] Amazon announced Kindle Format 8 and the Kindle Gen 2 platform today. It’s the first file format announcement that has me as excited as the launch of a new tablet device. ...

Vook will let you build hundreds of great looking eBooks - but we want to help you sell them too. There's no better way to show off our sales reporting tool than to let you watch your titles take off. ...

Another great thing about eBooks -- because you can carry thousands, you're never stuck if you realize a book you're reading isn't great. I put new books to The Dennis Cooper Test, ie, if a book's losing me, I'll switch ...

This post is a digression. We’re a platform focused on helping you create quality ebooks that you can distribute everywhere, but! I have seen much discussion recently about when enhanced ebooks work. Having produced 800 + enhanced titles, I wanted ...

We've been kicking around some words that describe what you can do with Vook's platform. We thought we'd share them with you -- write, create, make, build, lay out, embed, enhance, enrich, show, send, share, review, correct, fix, polish, distribute, ...