The Vook Blog Vook: Read it, Watch it.

We’ve worked with some pretty big name authors, but now we’re partnering with one of the world’s undisputed greats: William Shakespeare. And we think we’ve found a really interesting way to make some of his classic sonnets surpisingly fresh.

Just in time for Valentine’s Day, we’re releasing Love, Love, Love: Shakespeare in The City. The vook features ten of Shakespeare’s timeless sonnets enhanced with passionate, funny, and deeply moving videos, where everyday people riff on the mysteries of love, the pain and the pleasure, the lust and the loss, sharing their feelings while they try to decipher the finer points of Shakespeare’s vision of the heart.

Check out the trailer here. Or just pick up the Vook and see for yourself—it’s only $2.99, which is far cheaper than a bad date and full of enough insight to get you a great one.

Anyone who’s ever been in love—or out of love—will find something to identify with here. The videos really bring the power of the poems home. Seeing real people dig into them in unexpected environments makes the diction and phrasing of Shakespeare instantly understandable, almost contemporary. It’s a must watch for students of poetry and the heart.

Again, always feel to drop us a a line at Matthew@vook.com if you have ideas for vooks or if you just want to tell us what you think!

We’ve told you we’re going to be releasing a host of Vooks in 2010— and the process is now officially underway. Tuesday saw the launch of our Woman’s Day Cookvook and today we’re unveiling Treasure Island. We put a lot of time and love into Treasure Island and it shows on every page. With beautiful textures, over 90 gorgeous images and a fully hyperlinked text, Treasure Island is a brand new type of Vook. Our ability to integrate high quality visuals and hyperlinks to explain a variety of terms (I have to admit, I always wondered what exactly the foc’sle was) makes reading Treasure Island a rich, immersive experience.

We’ve incorporated most of N.C. Wyeth’s stunning color illustrations—pictures that will take anyone who read Treasure Island as a kid straight back to their childhood—along with historical images and classic nautical illustrations and charts. Our ability to rapidly create vooks without any laborious production process means we’re going to be able to do a TON of these types of enhancements and offer the vook to readers at an unbeatable price. Right now, there are Treasure Island apps available in the iTunes store at a variety of prices. But our app has more content, hyperlinks, and more images than any other available version—and it’s only $1.99. It’s the best way to read Treasure Island on your mobile and we’re in the midst of preparing to offer a huge variety of other classic books and stories with a wider range of enhancements. So start with Treasure Island, and get ready to enjoy the classics in a whole new way.

We’re thrilled to announce the release of the Woman’s Day Cookvook: Healthy Food for Everyday Living —our new vook that’s packed with 45 mouth watering videos, ranging from decadent but surprisingly healthy chocolate concoctions to a delicious low-fat macaroni and cheese dinner. It’s the largest number of videos we’ve published in a vook yet and we’re proud to show just how much great content we can pack into one title.

The vook features 45 recipes, tips and shopping pointers with an accompanying 45 videos: you can see exactly how to master a complicated cooking technique, how to cook a wonderful dish—such as the incredible Fudge Brownie Pudding Cake—and how to shop smart to save time and money. Furthermore, the videos are really fun. We’ve combined video appearances by experts on the Woman’s Day staff with recipes cooked by everyday people—women around the country with families, jobs, and demanding schedules who show you how to create the recipes in a way that’s fun and easy to follow. The videos are not just instructional—they’re entertaining and they make the process of cooking a meal for an entire family into something you’ll actually look forward to.

Not only is the Woman’s Day Cookvook a stellar title, it’s a powerful partnership. To create the cookvook, we partnered with Hachette Filipacchi Media and Woman’s Day to take their great recipes and expert advice and quickly and effectively turn out a value packed product. The Woman’s Day Cookvook: Healthy Food for Everyday Living demonstrates that Vook can make great, high quality content (and lots of it!) and bring it quickly to market at a value price. The Cookvook is available as a browser app or for our iPod or iPhone touch —and both platforms are easily adaptable to any location, making the vook a convenient solution for a busy kitchen. The potential for anyone looking to innovate in the cooking and recipe worlds is limitless with Vook. Whether a potential partner has already created video content or needs videos of their excellent recipe ideas, we’re here to help them enter the world of food culture in the digital age.

Vook is expanding aggressively—and that means we’re hiring! We’re looking for a Director of Marketing, a Product Manager and a Hyperlinking Assistant. Anyone who wants to work with a young, rapidly growing company in a cutting edge industry should apply. We want self starters who are looking to grow with us, people who are motivated, smart, responsive, and flexible. It’s an exciting opportunity to be on the forefront of digital publishing. We look forward to hearing from you—links to the job postings are below.

Product Manager: http://newyork.craigslist.org/mnh/sof/1534531177.html

Director of Marketing: http://newyork.craigslist.org/mnh/mar/1534525792.html

Hyperlink Assistant:  http://sfbay.craigslist.org/eby/cpg/1541965097.html

This year, whether you want to lose weight, look great, or make money doing what you love (or all of the above. Why not?), we’ve got a vook for you. For a limited time, we’re offering a special promotion with discounted pricing on our self improvement Vooks — The 90 Second Fitness Solution, Return to Beauty and Crush It!

With these three vooks, you can cover some of the major to-dos for any great year: health, wealth, and happiness. The 90 Second Fitness Solution shows you how to get trim and stay healthy in only 90 seconds a day with easy to follow videos that illustrate core exercise techniques. In Return To Beauty author Narine Nikogosian demonstrates all natural beauty recipes that you can make in your kitchen with household ingredients. Finally, Crush It! by Gary Vaynerchuk, is a New York Times bestselling guide on how to live your dreams and make money doing what you love. It’s enhanced with fun videos of entrepreneur and social media genius Gary Vaynerchuk showing you smart tips and pointers on how to get ahead in the digital economy. And you can get all of them for a limited time, discounted price!

We’re determined to help you meet your personal goals this year and we know these great titles offer an elegant, intuitive way for you to make sure your resolutions really do get resolved.

Happy New Year,

Team Vook

Friends,

2009 was an explosive year for Vook. We watched our vooks become hits with readers and we took a leading role in the digital book revolution that’s sweeping the publishing industry. When we started production on our first vooks in June, our mission struck some people as odd. But an early story by technology writer Brad Stone in the New York Times detailing founder Brad Inman’s plan to integrate a book with videos and Internet links resonated with readers, encouraging us to move forward with our early betas. In six months, we released eight titles and garnered great reviews, very strong sales and overwhelming consumer support. As Vook broke new ground in digital publishing, we witnessed an acceleration of change in the publishing industry with the appearance of new companies, new formats, and new technologies.

Vook has created a format that many major publishers, agents and authors want to participate in. We have tens of thousands of new readers — and we have new technologies, new partners and new products coming in 2010. Look for 200 or more titles in the new year!

We’ve come a long way, but our journey is just beginning. In October, we launched our first four vooks with our partner Simon and Schuster to a raft of coverage — from the front page of the New York Times to Salon to the LA Times to U.S.A. Today to Entertainment Weekly to NPR. We then released Gary Vaynerchuk’s “Crush It!” with the Harper Collins imprint HarperStudio. If the S&S titles were a major proof of concept, “Crush It!” was the perfect follow up—it succeeded with critics and readers. Within a few weeks, vook sales of the title caught up with the Kindle sales and Twitter heated up with tons of tweets from readers who loved the vook.

We then launched an inaugural cooking title and a vook of Sherlock Holmes. We proved that we could easily scale when we turned real estate columnist Kris Berg’s popular blog into a vook in only two weeks.

We’ve demonstrated that we can move fast to make new vooks and then market them to the right audience. And we’re grabbing the public’s imagination. Our company name and the new format is rapidly becoming part of the popular lexicon: The New York Times and Wired included us in their word lists for the year. We started to see the term vook popping up — from the New York Times to Wikipedia — as the catchall phrase to describe digital books. “Ebook” and “Enhanced book” don’t quite trip off the tongue — but the word vook struck a chord with an industry itching for a better way to describe this exciting new format.

Since day one Apple has been a tremendously supportive distribution partner. We cannot thank the team there enough for featuring and promoting Vook, the company, and many of our titles — one endorsement last week led to 20,000 downloads of our Sherlock Holmes Experience in just a few days.

In 2010, Vook is determined to go from being a new company (and word) to a household standard. We’re lining up hundreds of vooks for production and we’re pursuing multiple agent, publisher and author partnerships. We’ve made great strides with our distribution relationships, and look forward to announcing some major partnerships in 2010 that will help Vook reach an even larger audience.

Thanks to our publishing partners, authors, technologists and agents for your support. For those of you just following us, we appreciate your curiosity as we push the boundaries of digital books and enhanced content this year.

2010 will rock!

Happy New Year,

The Vook Team

We are thrilled to announce a tremendously successful week of downloads for our Sherlock Holmes Experience vook. With great support from Apple, picking our app as the #1 “Staff Favorite” for the holiday week, Sherlock received over 17,000 20,000 downloads in just a matter of a few days (Ed: we just got some NEW sales info, upping the numbers even higher!).

2009 was a great year for Vook—it was the year we launched and it was the year we saw the publishing industry start committing to the digital medium. As our holiday present to everyone, we gave away our Sherlock Holmes Vook for free in the iTunes store from December 23rd through the 27th. We expected we’d get at most a few thousand downloads—after all, it’s difficult to attract attention even for a free app. And it was the middle of the holidays. So, with modest expectations, we set the app price to free and welcomed a few days of vacation.

Imagine our surprise this morning when we got our sales figures from Apple for those days.

17,000 20,000 downloads! (Ed: We can’t get enough of this)

We were stunned. We’d seen some good responses on Twitter and through email, but nothing of this magnitude. 17,000 20,000 people have had the chance to read and watch and enjoy our enhanced version of Sherlock Holmes. 17,000 20,000 people know what a Vook is—and why we think it’s such a great new platform for books.

We want to thank all of you who downloaded the free Sherlock Holmes Vook. We thought we were giving the reading public a gift, but you all made our offer into a huge present for us. Thanks to all of you who downloaded the Sherlock Holmes Experience, tweeted about it, mentioned it on Facebook, told their friends, and sent us emails. We’re glad we have such a great audience—and we can’t wait to bring you more great vooks!

Happy New Year!

Team Vook

Getting on Wired’s Jargon Watch was a nice coup for Vook, but now recognition for creating the word “Vook” is rolling in so fast that our Google Alerts are beginning to resemble the what-to-get-who for Christmas email chains we have with our family. The most prominent notice we’ve received is from the New York Times, who made “vook” one of their Buzzwords of the Year. On top of that, The American Dialect Society nominated Vook, along with a number of others, as a Word of the Year for 2009. Then the site Wordnik (“the most comprehensive dictionary in the known universe”), whose Grant Barrett compiled the NYT buzzwords, added a really nice listing of Vook-related links and terms to our entry on their site.

Founder Brad Inman doesn’t remember exactly how he came up with the word Vook, but company lore has it that Brad was writing an email about a book and typed “vook” instead. If you look on your keyboard, you’ll see that the “v” key is right next to the “b” key. It’s a perfect digital age transposition — and a happy accident.

Starting today and running through the weekend, we’re dropping the price of the Sherlock Holmes Experience iPhone app to $0.00! That’s right: the iTunes app is FREE.

Why? Well, we’re getting into the holiday spirit. If you’re like us, you might cap your big holiday meal with a family trip to the local movie theater. We’ve got our eye on Sherlock Holmes — who better to portray the amateur violinist, occasional drug dabbler and coolly detached great detective than Robert Downey Jr? We’re especially looking forward to the film because we’ve learned so much about the world of Arthur Conan Doyle and Sherlock, thanks to our Sherlock Holmes Experience Vook. We announced the vook version of two classic Holmes stories — “The Man with the Twisted Lip” and “The Adventure of the Speckled Band” — a few weeks ago and the response has been outstanding. In fact, the Sherlock Holmes Experience Vook is a staff favorite in the Apple iTunes store — which means we’re not the only ones who think it’s great!

We wanted to share Sherlock with you this holiday. Maybe you’ll get an iPod Touch for Christmas or an iPhone for hanukkah and you’ll want a cool app to show off your new device. Maybe you want to see Sherlock and bring the stories with you to the theater. Maybe you just want to try a vook and haven’t had the chance. Whatever your interest, we want you to have Sherlock for free. No strings attached, no email receipt, no passwords. We’re making it free. Just click here and you can get the iPhone app of Sherlock Holmes for FREE. Or go to Vook.Com to get the Browser version.

We’re sure you’ll enjoy The Sherlock Holmes Experience Vook. Drop us a line and let us know what you think of the app and of the movie. You can write us anytime at Matthew@vook.com

Happy Holidays,

Team Vook

ADDENDUM: A slight revision to this post: We’re making the iTunes App completely free, but the Browser version we’re going to offer for .99 cents. At .99 cents, the Browser based Sherlock Vook is more than a steal—15 great videos and two classic Holmes AND a completely hyperlinked text, all for less than a dollar. And the iTunes Sherlock App remains FREE. So check them out today. You can get the iTunes app in the iTunes store and the browser based Vook is available at www.vook.com.

Last time we remarked the entry of the word Vook into the popular lexicon, it was jockeying for position as Word of the Year with “swine flu” “death panel” and “shovel-ready.” Worthy competitors, sure, but kind of grim company. So we’re grateful that in our latest close-up we’re not sharing as much of the spotlight—Wired magazine has us at the top of the Jargon Watch column in their January 2010 issue. Even better, they get the description of our product exactly right. You can see the entry in the print version of the magazine (it doesn’t appear to be online yet), but for the curious it reads: “Vook, n. An ebook with embedded video content. Designed to be read on a computer or iPhone (no Kindle version yet), the first four vooks include a fitness manual with exercise clips and a romance with atmospheric footage.” It would have been great if they’d mentioned our new Sherlock Holmes title or Gary Vaynerchuk’s Crush It!— but we’re pretty sure that Wired’s going to have a lot of opportunity to cover us more soon. This is a great early Christmas gift from some of the sharpest minds in tech—and we’re grateful. Thanks Wired!