Vook

The Art of eBooks, The Art of Blending

Fri, 09 Nov 2012 16:46:00 -0500

Designed like a print book, The Art of Blending presented Vook with “the consummate challenge of designing for eBooks. But I think we succeeded.”

Spice-blending extraordinaire Lior Lev Sercarz came to Vook with his own twist on an cookbook: recipes centered around his famous spice blends. Trained as a chef in France under Olivier Roellinger and having cooked for Daniel Boulud in New York, Lior has spent the last several years creating spice blends for the world’s best chefs under the label La Boîte á Epice. Last year, he opened La Boîte, a store and art gallery in New York City that sells his spice blends and a line of sweet-savory biscuits. Now, Lior has published The Art of Blending, an eBook to highlight his blends, tell the stories behind them, and share recipes as a way of encouraging readers to explore spices in their own kitchens.

Vook’s Jeffrey Yozwiak led the project and had this to say about the title, its challenges, and the end result: “This is perhaps the most highly-designed title we’ve ever produced. Lior and Lisa Fisher, the Creative Director, urged us to go to the utmost limits of what’s possible in the reflowable format. They had really designed their content for the print book format. It was a challenge to translate the aspects of the content and the flow that worked best in print. And make them work equally well in an eBook in which the text reflows to fit a variety of screen sizes. That’s one of the consummate challenges of designing for eBooks. But I think we succeeded.”

Custom formatting, high-resolution video, and stunning images culminate to create one of the most gorgeous eBooks we’ve ever produced. Purchase The Art of Blending on the Vook store to read it online or download it to the device of your choice. We want to let the design speak for itself so we’ve included pictures below. Feeling inspired? A VookMaker can translate your project to your dream eBook. Sign up for a free consultation today.

How AARP Serves Their Audience Better Than Ever

Tue, 06 Nov 2012 13:16:00 -0500

With the release of its digital manual, AARP Guide to Caregiving, AARP has repurposed an enormous volume of content to focus on one particularly tricky subject: caregiving for the elderly. Guide to Caregiving covers everything from health to housing, legal matters to emotional issues. The AARP is an excellent example of a company smartly expanding into ebooks to make it easier to deliver content to its core audience . Here’s how AARP is able to include more content, reach more people, and do so more efficiently via digital publishing:

Links: every resource at your fingertips

The range of topics covered is wide, but the digital book format allows AARP to pack massive amounts of information into a manageable eBook. Throughout the guide, AARP links to its own online Caregiving Resource Center, Legal Services Network, and other articles to supplement their guide. Readers can decide for themselves how much additional information to pursue on a topic. Furthermore, Guide to Caregiving embeds text with links to external online resources: government agencies, homecare services, disease-specific organizations, etc. At the end of the manual, a “Resources” section lists them all out again.

Not just for an iPad

By releasing Guide to Caregiving through Vook, AARP ensures that anyone with access to a computer can read the eBook through our browser-based reader. This is important for the many elderly who do not have eReaders but do have plenty of computer time.

Easy to disperse and promote

AARP has 37 million members. Providing members with a digital guide is more efficient and less expensive than selling hard copies, distinctions that are particularly important for nonprofits.

Check out AARP Guide to Caregiving and their other guide, AARP 299 Great Ways to Save , on Vook’s store. Interested to see what Vook can do for your organization? Sign up at Vook.com to learn more.

Advice from writers, to writers

Fri, 02 Nov 2012 15:16:23 -0400

The best of advice from our authors

We spend a lot of time talking to our authors while we build their eBooks, but we also like to keep in touch after they’re released. We’ve conducted interviews with several successful authors to learn about their titles, backgrounds, and thoughts on digital publishing. While we’re at it, we often pick their brains on how they get over the hardest part of the process: writing. At Vook, we make building and selling eBooks easy, but no amount of technology can cure writer’s block forever.

If you’re stuck staring at a blank page, we’ve culled the best writing advice that authors have shared with Vook. Read more below and feel free to add your comments.

Take notes everywhere you go. Joanna Crispi, world traveler, tells Vook, “I don’t keep a travel journal, but I write everything longhand in notebooks. I fill them up with notes, drafts of novels, random observations. I date each notebook, so it makes it easy to go back and find what I wrote at any particular time.” Kate Milford similarly uses notebooks: “I’m really drawn to oddball stuff, weird pockets of history, folklore, and roadside stuff. A lot of times I’ll come across these things, note them down, think ‘man that would be a unique thing for a story.’ Then five or six ideas will come together and I write 15-20 pages to see if it continues to come together.”

Build a map before diving in. Joanna adds, “I don’t start writing until I see the whole story in my head. Then I write the story down in 2-3 pages, from beginning to end. When you start writing before you have a beginning and an end, it’s easy to get lost. So I recommend having a map in case you lose your bearings.”

Give yourself a daily goal to stay disciplined. “When it comes down to the draft, I can turn out a lot of good work if I just make myself write 1500 words everyday, whether or not I’m on a deadline,” notes Kate.

“Do it everyday,” Dorothy Hoobler tells Vook. “It’s hard to meet deadlines if you don’t work on a regular basis. Otherwise, you get writer’s block. It’s one thing to write a paper in college the night before it’s due; it’s hard to write a book the night before.”

“You can’t wait until you’re inspired to write,” adds her husband, Thomas Hoobler. “You’re not going to be inspired everyday. Even though you’re not ready to write the moment you sit down, you stare at the screen or paper and eventually you get there. You’ll get ideas that you wouldn’t have had were you not sitting there being receptive to your brain.” Note: Thomas also likes writing longhand and then transferring to the computer.

“Writing is re-writing,” says Ariane de Bonvoisin. ”Expect to re-write things dozens of times, so don’t be attached to anything. A word, paragraph, chapter, order, character, name…everything can change.”

Finally, “write what you know, but write,” advises Warren Adler. “I consider myself an artist. And if you’re an artist, you go no matter what. You do it because you have to. I can no more stop writing than I can stop breathing. That’s what a real writer or artist knows in his gut.”

"New technologies should create opportunities for writers to be creative pioneers."

Fri, 02 Nov 2012 11:53:11 -0400

"New technologies should create opportunities for writers to be creative pioneers.":

Shuffle: Hypertext ePub Fiction

Creating an eBook, Creating Art

Fri, 02 Nov 2012 11:32:05 -0400

21 artists showcase their works and tell their stories in Create: Transforming Stories of Art, Life, & Faith, produced byThe Grove Center for the Arts & Media. General Edtior Joey O’Connor writes in the introduction: “For years I have dreamed of creating a book designed to share the personal, professional and spiritual journeys of artists from different disciplines all in the hope of inspiring other artists to persevere and excel in their creative work.” To do so, Joey leverages multimedia to create a powerful art experience that would not have been possible in a printed book or even a gallery. Like a printed book, vivid paintings and photographs supplement the text. But Joey brings the art to life with videos of painters painting, dancers dancing, and—just like Joey—artists using technology to push the boundaries of art. It is also worth noting the design of Create itself: artful drop caps at the beginnings of paragraphs and a clean, thoughtful format.

Create is available on the Vook store for online reading and direct download to your desktop and eReader. To learn more about building an eBook with Vook, visit Vook.com.

Great authors deserve great eBooks. Learn more: Vook.com.

Mon, 22 Oct 2012 18:54:06 -0400

Great authors deserve great eBooks. Learn more: Vook.com.

eBook designs from Vook’s own Adam Schnapper. Learn more:...

Mon, 22 Oct 2012 18:49:00 -0400

eBook designs from Vook’s own Adam Schnapper. Learn more: Vook.com.

I love when a book’s cover perfectly reflects its content....

Sun, 14 Oct 2012 11:45:00 -0400

I love when a book’s cover perfectly reflects its content. Today: photographer-author Serge Ramelli’s covers for his digital retouching how-to eBooks.

Introducing VookMakers, an expert team of eBook creators. We...

Sun, 14 Oct 2012 11:02:00 -0400

Introducing VookMakers, an expert team of eBook creators. We can build, style, and distribute eye-catching eBooks at affordable rates.

eBook conversion: We’ll handle the process of creating an eBook from your raw materials (Word docs, PDFs, InDesign, and more!)
Enhanced eBooks: We enhance eBooks with images, videos, charts, and links
Expert styling: We can create a unique look and feel for your eBook that renders properly across a variety of eReaders and mobile devices
Distribution: We can distribute your eBook to Amazon, iBookstore, and Barnes & Noble as well as provide a free ISBN and daily sales tracking dashboard
Cover design: We have professional designers who know how to build eye-catching covers so your eBook stands out from the crowd
Free consultation: Vook offers free one-on-one consultations with VookMakers, so you’ll get exactly what you want

Learn more and sign up at Vook.com.

Vook is a cloud-based ePublishing platform that makes it easy to...

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 13:57:05 -0500

Vook is a cloud-based ePublishing platform that makes it easy to create great looking digital books, distribute and promote them, and track their sales!

VOOK & THE CASE OF 300,000 AMAZON DOWNLOADS

Thu, 13 Oct 2011 15:08:00 -0400

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.

We’ve carefully tracked the performance of every eBook we’ve released. We’re using that wealth of data to inform how we build our platform – but we wanted to give you a taste of it in advance.

So we’ve written a white paper. You can download it now – if you join the Vook beta. It explains how we generated more than 300,000 Amazon downloads. It includes the tactics, the numbers and how you can recreate our success. Author D.D Scott also shares how she drives more than 5,000 sales a month with similar methods.

To get it, just sign up for the Vook beta here: http://thanks.vook.com/

You’ll be able to instantly download the paper. And you’ll be able to join the Vook beta — which is launching soon!

A THOUSAND EBOOK DEATH MATCH

Wed, 12 Oct 2011 17:36:00 -0400

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 to a Dennis Cooper novel instead. Sentences like “Chris’s shock was so dense and complex that it collided with the world’s very different complexity, sort of like what happens when a very strong light hits a very big jewel” connect with me in a way even obviously good books can’t if they don’t have that ambiguous extra thing that makes them exceptional.

The latest book failing the DC Test is Russel Bank’s Lost Memory of Skin. Which bugs me because I want to like it, but I can’t get through it. Before eBooks, I would have finished it. Instead I’m halfway through and probably won’t get farther. Which I think is great. It’s like a gift of time. I can put my mental finger on what’s missing from Lost Memory because I can switch to another book and be engrossed again. I’ve got a “what I want a book to do for me” point of immediate comparison. And why would I settle when I know what I could have? So I wait til I’m off the subway, get back on Kindle, go looking for the next book that might deliver that experience, stop time, do whatever really great books do for me. Today I brought We Are the Animals.

Real quick: Why don’t I like Lost Memory of Skin? I want to. But it reads like the book/author is telling us the Internet is doing bad things to us. Like the book’s trying to make a point, talk right at us. I’d rather read Dennis Cooper because the voice comes from inside a head that’s convincingly rendered as having a problem. The Banks characters seem like people who have a problem — but some other guy is going to tell you about it. That’s too … essayistic? To pull from the top: Lost Memory of Skin is a really strong light. I’m looking for the strong light and the big jewel both.

Tl;dr: eReaders are awesome because you can face off new books against your favorites. I just did it and the new Russel Banks lost.

REMEMBER TO SIGN UP FOR OUR BETA AT HTTP://VOOK.COM

ENHANCED EBOOKS AS LITERATURE

Mon, 10 Oct 2011 19:11:00 -0400

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 to weigh in — mostly on a personal level — to relate my particular feelings that I can no longer keep bottled up.

When it comes to enhancements, book lovers like to say they work fine for non-fiction, but fiction’s off limits. Enhancements dumb down books, are destructive, spazzy, distracting. I think that’s the accepted argument. Dark secret — I don’t really get it.

Enhancements can work fine in literature. In some cases they may even improve a book, which is the kind of statement that could get me banhammered in digital and real world book salons alike.

It’s not conjecture though. Great books are being produced right now with enhancements. Such as … People Still Live In Cashtown Corners, by Tony Burgess. It’s a 201 page novel from ChiZine Publications, released in 2010. I read it on the Kindle App for iPad.

The book tells the story of gas station clerk Bob Clark’s apparently unprovoked killing spree in rural Cashtown Corners, culminating with Clark barricaded in the home of a family he’s murdered. Sounds grim? It is! But it’s also smart, tricky, brainy, entrancing. I was hooked by the first two paragraphs, which read like Robbe-Grillet doing a Thomas Bernhard impression. I’m a sucker for Robbe Grillet and Bernhand so mashing them up? Mr. Burgess, where may I subscribe to your newsletter?

I thought it was a plain text book—but it’s got a twist. Halfway through, I swiped from one page to the next and had a shock. SPOILER: Burgess has embedded an image purporting to depict a crime scene from Clark’s rampage. The photos show grainy, real-life scenes that push into reality in a way I didn’t expect. The next few pages then shift without explanation to pictures of a crude World Trade Center art project one of Clark’s victims was building in school.

The pictures expand the previously hermetic universe of the novel, forcing you to connect events real and imagined, staged and actual, drawing imaginary lines between crime scene photos we’ve seen on the Internet and TV, the perpetrators behind them, the victims in them. They make a strange book stranger but also stronger, like the suddenly illuminating digressions in a Chris Marker film.

It’s art. Good art. Not emotional art. But art that did something to my brain I didn’t expect. I enjoyed it. I had an experience. I remember the experience more strongly than I remember reading the Family Fang, which I liked, but which was about people trying to create the feeling Burgess actually inflicts on you in the eBook version of Cashtown.

And I’d claim that these photographs wouldn’t work in a print version. I’d be able to tell by the change in the paper consistency and the glimpse of a darker line from an illustrated page that some kind of picture was coming. The element of surprise would be gone. And it’s the surprise and the shock and the smooth transition from text to image to image to image that makes your brain speed up while simultaneously trying to slow down and work out connections. Which creates vertigo. And tension. And a strange powerful sense of unease and displacement.

That’s one example of a piece of excellently effective enhanced literature. There are more. There will be more. But for everyone who claims enhancements can’t work in literature, I say: Enhancements can work fine – you just aren’t reading enough books.

Ha!

Tl;dr: You might not like enhanced ebooks but there’s an awesome arty one that works with some creepy pictures. Also, Stone Arabia, the narrator wishes it had a video in it, at one point! DANA SPIOTTA WRITE ME!

A video from our latest Vook! Buy-In: Saving Your Good Idea From...

Wed, 06 Oct 2010 19:26:00 -0400

A video from our latest Vook! Buy-In: Saving Your Good Idea From Getting Shot Down.

Our One Year Anniversay

Fri, 01 Oct 2010 17:01:13 -0400

Our One Year Anniversay

Wake Up your Abs!

Thu, 30 Sep 2010 19:06:50 -0400

Wake Up your Abs!

It’s the homepage of the iBooks store. And that’s...

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 18:11:24 -0400

It’s the homepage of the iBooks store. And that’s our 90-Second Fitness Solution Vook.

Seth Godin Talks about iTunes

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 17:27:46 -0400

On his blog today, Seth Godin announced that his latest Vook, Linchpin, is on sale in the iTunes store.

He also reflected on the challenges of the iTunes model, or what he calls, “the long tail challenge of the iPad store.”

But, once again, the lesson of the long tail is this: you can’t count on the gatekeeper to do your promotion for you. Getting picked feels like a needle in a haystack, and the value of permission, of connecting directly to people who care instead of ceding control to a middle man, is at the heart of building an asset. Someone is going to be the gatekeeper, and it should be you.

What does 12-time New York Times bestselling author Sherrilyn...

Fri, 27 Aug 2010 15:27:14 -0400

What does 12-time New York Times bestselling author Sherrilyn Kenyon really want her readers to know?

Last week, we got homepage affection from Macmillan’s...

Mon, 16 Aug 2010 13:10:41 -0400

Last week, we got homepage affection from Macmillan’s online dictionary when they dubbed us (and defined us) as a “buzzword.”

Next stop: The OED.