Here’s a link to a handy little cheat sheet I created for the presentation: Enhanced eBook Basic Media Specs. We often have people ask us what are the requirements for the different file types that go into making an enhanced book—this cheat sheet will tell you everything you need to know.

The NYTech Meetup event was smashed with attendees and lines so long one of our team members was turned away. It’s the kind of thing that helps establish a start up. Along with companies such as Tatly, Sonar, and Etsy, we got to pitch Vook for six hours straight to a constant stream of SXSW attendees. The event was held at the Cedar Door on 3^rd street with a free flowing bar—which meant the questions became progressively more abstract as the evening progressed. But what more could a young company want than the opportunity  to explain our product to as many smart people as possible? We can’t thank the NYTech team enough for launching this event and including us. Jessica Lawrence spearheaded our involvement and much of the activity that we witnessed. She and the NYTech Meetup have built something powerful. And personally, it was as much fun as reading the constant NYTech listserv emails, which is saying something.

Everyone from the DOJ to Amazon.com is weighing in on the best way to price an eBook. It seems like a good time to bring up our eBook pricing whitepaper again; especially in light of us commenting in an MSNBC article on the DOJ investigation. Beyond the struggles between the big players, we wanted to highlight what we’ve learned publishing digital content and help you understand some ways you can think about pricing an ebook — or even just buying one.

It’s all about the algorithm
Digital retailers have invested millions of dollars in developing algorithms for optimal pricing on their products — with one goal in mind — to maximize revenue. This can benefit of the retailer, the publisher and, in most cases, the consumer. In our whitepaper on pricing, you can see how these algorithms work. Depending on factors like the category and discoverability of a given title, a higher or lower price may get you to that sweet spot.

But, what about control?
Algorithms that magically maximize revenue sound great, but there are times when a publisher may wish to have more control over the retail price. For example, when there is a substitute product, such as a physical book, whose sales may suffer from heavy discounting. Until now, publishers did not have the tools or the fine control necessary to make these fine adjustments.

Have it both ways
The latest publishing platforms, such as Vook, give both the feedback (daily sales reporting) and the control (interface for changing metadata on the fly) needed to maintain price integrity of their valuable content.

The legal implications of the DOJ and Agency pricing will work themselves out in time. But hopefully the publishing companies will soon be able to start “engineering up” as opposed to “lawyering up” — so they can begin developing interfaces and applications with companies like ours to make the most of digital books in a more flexible pricing environment. Take a look at our full whitepaper and let us know what you think the best way to price an eBook is.

But we’re a digital publishing operation so of course we’re piling on this Two Minute Hate. If Franzen’s railed against eBooks and decried Twitter, what better way to zing him then to make a Franzen targetted eBook out of Twitter itself?

We sourced some top tweets  from #jonathanfranzenhates and bookified them with Vook, thereby creating hypothetical Franzine kryptonite—a digital book version of a social media stream of tweets attacking the author for questioning its right to exist, wrapped up in another digital medium (the eBook) the author detests maybe more.

In movies, people are always realizing they’ve succeeded-but-too-ambitiously by doing something that symbolically indicates they’ve “destroyed the thing they love.” I think this happens in Boogie Nights, or Adaptation. If that TV trope has any basis in fact, our platform is definitely a victory, as it’s allowing us to cleverly abuse an author whose work we love. But so it goes in the digital future!

Click this link to get the ePub version of “The eBook Franzen Would Hate”

To download and read it, click here for instructions.

And much respect to Storify and the Guardian, whose Tweet stream story inspired us to make an actual eBook book.

The event’s on Sunday, March 11th from 6 to midnight at the Fast Company Grill at Cedar Door. You can RSVP for your spot here.

The Managing Director of NY Tech MeetUp is Jessica Lawrence, and she’s the driving force behind the showcase. It features a host of great companies (including some of our favorites, Warby Parker, Sonar, and Skillshare), the opportunity to pitch your ideas to angel investors, and the chance to drink with entrepreneurs and smart people who are making it here and on their way to making it everywhere. Stop by and see us!

eBook creation infrastructure and services are ripe for change. Vook estimates eBook costs such as design, conversion, enhancement, marketing, QA, distribution and sales tracking amounts to hundreds of millions of dollars this year alone — eating away at book publisher profits. Add that to the cost of distribution from etailers such as Amazon, Apple and Barnes & Noble, and profit margins are squeezed, wiping out gains that should be realized moving from physical to digital products.

A number of publishers are suddenly facing up to these realities and rethinking their workflow, systems and processes. They are questioning their hobbled-together production architecture that layers on incremental performing technologies and outsourced solutions on top of old-world physical book production.

After some honest examination, the bubble gum and paper clip approach to eBooks is proving to be too expensive, too inflexible and too prone to errors. The challenge is the classic “time and money” quandary with publishers using a variety of different vendor and software packages with limited collaboration and tracking capabilities.

Moreover, the current workflows do not scale and both eBook production insiders and executives are admitting it to one another. Demand for a more complete solution has never been stronger.

The weight of legacy systems is often underestimated. The people responsible for eBook production often see new technologies as threatening and do a poor job of estimating the true costs of their approach. And they retreat to the tired practices when they cannot find the perfect solution.

2012 will be the year for publishers to get strategic with their technology solutions — throwing out the past and starting over. If they fail to do so, they will be unable to compete.

In other industries, manufacturers, retailers and financial service companies who wanted to survive all aggressively dumped old systems and started over. Take cloud computing. Companies that ripped out their old IT departments and moved to the cloud are more efficient, agile and competitive. Most importantly, they freed up tech resources that can be devoted to innovation.

For publishes, their one advantage will be timely and cost effective production, but that edge swings on how bold they are wiling to be with their technology solutions.

We partnered with Ernst & Young and Knowledge@Wharton to produce Global Banking 2024, a free enhanced eBook that tackles the biggest questions facing financial institutions today with thoughtful text, sharply produced videos and great insights from the smartest minds in the business.

Before Vook, firms like Ernst & Young had to rely on information jammed Websites, cumbersome printed reports or long DVDs to share their knowledge. Thanks to Vook and eBooks and mobile devices, they can now compress their findings into an easy to read, great looking eBook. Since our platform makes it easy to integrate video, audio, images and text, we’re able to apply the advantages of the eBook format to many different kinds of content.

We’re proud to have produced this eBook with Ernst & Young and Knowledge@Wharton; and especially happy that we can share it with you for free. It’s a great introduction to the kind of titles you’ll be able to make on Vook very soon; and of the advantages eBooks offer diverse industries.

eBooks aren’t just for books anymore. . .

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!

Now, by extending our platform to others, we’re certain we’re going to produce 10,000 titles in 2024—after all, our beta users built some 500 plus books in only 60 days.

I’m laying out how we think about the future after reading a post from blogger and eBook consultant Leonard Feldman on our and Inkling’s move to offer eBook publishing platforms directly to creators. Feldman’s headline wonders if our decision is a smart one, but his column is more thoughtful than incendiary. No entrepreneur needs to be reminded of the difficulties ahead, but we appreciated Feldman’s clear grasp of the challenges.

Start-ups only succeed if they are using technology to solve a problem — the more gnarly the problem the more motivated that we get. For publishers, that problem is making quality ebooks smartly and efficiently. How it’s done today is absurd: it requires multiple  software packages, a multitude of vendors, a slew of touch points with content shipped overseers and shipped back. It does not make sense that the people who are best at finding authors, curating content and editing manuscripts are strapped with this mess.  The costs — direct and in lost opportunity — are staggering.

Fixing it is difficult — and that’s what technologists love to tackle, hard problems.

Inspired by the difficulties that we experienced producing hundreds of titles, we came up with a better and smarter way to create quality eBooks. Keep in mind that start-ups thrive by being responsive and flexible. Our investors love that we can respond to rapidly unfolding challenges and opportunities in a fast-changing industry. We don’t need to react to the upheaval. Instead, we take advantage of it because our team is smart, agile and accustomed to operating in disruptive industries.

In the end, we’ve always been determined to extend Vook. Check out this press release from 2024, where we announce what we were then calling the ‘Mothervook’ platform, which will “provide a streamlined system for creating multi-media ebooks.” The Vook platform is what makes us who we are. We’re eBook technologists, providing technical, engineering solutions to the knotty problems of digital books.

The results of our closed beta also got picked up by such excellent outlets as The Street, Market Watch, and The Sacramento Bee. Brand new start-up focused blog Betakit interviewed me in an article that also featured Inkling and 24Symbols. It’s always nice to appear in the company of other exceptional innovators.

It’s been a solid week of news and announcements for us. Expect more in the next few weeks leading up to a really big hullabaloo shortly.