Our VookMakers can do the work for you. Users call Vook “super easy-to-use,” but we get that not everyone’s into DIY publishing. So today we’re launching our VookMakers program. Our VookMakers are eBook experts who will build your eBook, send you review copies, incorporate your feedback, and realize your vision. Last week, a publisher contacted us with ten eBooks he didn’t have the resources to build himself. After we connected him to a VookMaker, he had eBooks to review in a day. Read more…
We surveyed our users last week—and hundreds of them rushed to tell us what they thought of Vook. A big thanks to all respondents; the winner of the free Professional account is our user Tonya Gupta (congrats Tonya!). When we reviewed the survey, two comments came up with stunning frequency: 1) Our users love our product. They call it “elegant” “easy to use” “incredibly well designed” and “so simple”. 2) Our users need more flexible pricing. A vast majority of Read more…
We’re obviously grateful to Lerer Ventures for investing in Vook — but we personally love the benefits and support they extend to their portfolio companies. They’re often both useful and cool. This Tuesday, they one-upped themselves by gathering members of their start-ups at Citi Field to hear from New York’s Entrepreneur-in-Chief, Mike Bloomberg. We expected a polite overview on innovation, finance and the city’s CTO (to cover the tech angle)—but instead the Mayor delivered an impassioned, metrics driven talk focused Read more…
We were both nervous and excited to see Twitter user @AudryT live Tweet her first experience with Vook on Wednesday. Without any editorializing (except for removing some unrelated Tweets), below is her trip through Vook — the good and the bad (we’re working on the smart quotes now, Audry!). AudryT @AudryT Takin’ a look at the Vook Builder tool. Will it be easy drag and drop? Will it take the coding out of digital books? *fingers crossed* At first Read more…
A funny paradox of the eBook revolution — it’s easier than ever to create digital books, but frustratingly complex to share them and difficult for readers to actually read them without the right device or application. eBooks have turned books into pieces of software and publishers into software companies. The very smart Peter Brantley first articulated this distinction for me in an email remark, but it’s a concept — a new kind of category and role for book makers to Read more…
We missed a year of SXSW and the thing grew ten times in size. We hit town Sunday, March 11 to participate in NYTech Meetup’s Made in New York Event—and the few hours we spent outside of it was like visiting a tech Mardi Gras in the middle of Texas. Google and Blackberry houses had colonized the south of downtown, ringed by specialty food carts like chuckwagons. VCs and CFOs were giving presentations on budgets in dive bars a block Read more…
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 Read more…
When Jonathan Franzen bashed Twitter, he was just carrying on the relentless crusade he’s waging against the Internet and social media every time he steps up to a mic. He’s like a bookish, bizarro world Chuck D. — Black Steel Glasses in the Hour of Social Media Chaos. The outrage he’s kicked off makes him kind of the closest thing literature has to a bad boy though. From Michelle Houellebecq to Jonathan Littell to Jonathan Franzen, middle aged white guys Read more…
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 Read more…
We had two great pieces of news this week: We released the results of our closed beta and we announced our relationship with the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses to extend Vook to its members at a reduced rate. We’re particularly proud of this deal, because it means more of the small presses we love and support as readers will be able to start making more digital books. The results of our closed beta also got picked up by Read more…
