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 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…
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…
I was sitting in an executive’s office at a major publisher last week. We couldn’t access the wireless network — in fact, there didn’t seem to be a wireless network — so I grabbed a nearby Ethernet cord and plugged it into my Internet port and immediately the port started smoking and the room filled with the smell of burnt plastic. The fire turned out to be superficial, but the metaphor’s apt: Vook’s in the offices of publishers big and small Read more…
Our platform’s a work in progress—and it always will be. The only technology that’s ever ‘done’ is a technology that’s obsolete (insert lazy joke about the printing press here). As new file types (ePub3, KF8) emerge, we’ll be adapting Vook to produce them quickly, and we constantly adjust to keep track of changes and updates in devices and reader apps. Everyday, our engineers push new code to our platform that improves the experience. But sometimes we have a bigger push Read more…
Before posting more on cloud-based reading experiences, I wanted to give everyone a quick update on the Vook beta. Everyday, users are working in Vook and helping us identify issues we need to address. Our engineering queue is essentially a cue taken from our users — ha! (Like that? Wait til you read my Vook produced comic memoir!) Last week we fixed 48 issues that users caught — items ranging from Kindle file generation to adding the ability to delete projects. Read more…
