Our children’s titles have always been a hit with young readers, but now we’ve upped the ante and produced a Vook that will wow the entire family. We produced it with the company Kindermusik and it’s called “America The Musical 1776-1899: A Nation’s History Through Music” and, as it promises on the cover, it relates our country’s history as a rich, fun, interactive, video and song packed extravaganza.

We’re going to be producing more explosively colorful experiences like “America The Musical”—so you should check out this new direction for children’s titles with our first effort. And it’s the perfect Vook to have on hand at Thanksgiving. You can celebrate what we’re grateful for as a country with some of the most cutting edge examples of our national creativity and inventiveness available—the iPad and this great app.

Happy Thanksgiving,

Team Vook

A recent blog post on authors and the gaming space swiped at Vook in its headline — which got our attention, mostly because we’ve been thinking about the same thing. We’d like to think the post’s author isn’t aware of the extent of what we’re building, but in the fast paced world of digital publishing, those who take time to get defensive are dead. What engages us — and probably the post’s author — is the increasingly pressing question of what separates a Book App from an Ebook.  That’s going to be a key question for content publishers in the next few months and years. We think an early break down looks something like this:

APPS:

• Rich images with easy to use design and flair: ie,  Post Pix
• Simple video instructional: ie, our Pilates titles
• Rich design and lots and lots of graphics/videos: ie, JFK
• Rich design and interactive gaming: ie, Angry Birds, Rage HD
• Rich design and artsy gaming: ie, Osmosis

KEY TO WIN: unique, immersive experience, goes from one blast of pop up colorful media to another blast of pop up colorful media. Games with a book-like feel will be a winner here; not books with a game-like feel.

EBOOKS

• More text based
• Video enhancements and text work closely together
• A consumption experience — minimal interaction
• Page turning and playing videos and expanding images
• Note taking
• Sharing favorite quotes
• Simple but clean book-like design is easy to use and read

KEY TO WIN: Quality of content, well written text, name brand author. More of a book world experience than an app world experience.

There’s going to be other differentiators — but if you ask us, the rush to get your book into an app will begin to migrate into a rush to get your book into a book reading app (ie, iBookstore, Kindle, BN, etc) for more text based titles pretty quickly. Our ability to add enhancements puts us in a sweet spot that bridges apps and ebooks — but we’re building comprehensive solutions for both worlds that will probably begin to look more different from each other as they become more suited to their format.

Looking for a Lawyer Who Loves to Make Deals and Loves Books

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Publishing iPad apps is a great excuse to indulge your geeky heart in the name of market research—the Games category in iPad is the competitive landscape, right? So I had to pick up id’s Rage HD the day it came out. If an on-rails shooter about blasting mutants can take the #1 overall spot in iPad apps, what does it say about the business, the marketplace and the consumer?

After playing Rage, I’m guessing it means we iPad consumers have a lot in common. We want an immersive, wowser iPad experience. We want a quick fix and a lit up screen—and lots of gibs. Does that mean the iPad’s a gaming vehicle? Not really. We’ve tried all the best iPad games but we’ve still logged 10x the hours in our iPad Kindle App, reading great books. Games will always sell a lot on the iPad, but to us that’s less about games, more about how quickly they serve the strengths of the device. A game like Rage or Angry Birds isn’t escapist so much as erase-ist. You start the game. You look up. An hour’s passed. They eliminate time. But books can do the same thing. I’ve ripped through Patrick Ness’s “Chaos Walking Trilogy” (same went for Freedom) because it is so well written you can’t stop flipping the pages on your Amazon Kindle. Books compete just fine in the digital space—as long as they’re good. And enhanced books have to be even better, because they’re strutting their stuff against scary monsters in Rage.

An app is successful in so far as the user can’t stop using it and wants to come back. And there is a lesson here for book publishers. Users aren’t looking for the exactly formatted, perfectly laid out, absolutely precise piece of media. In Book Apps, they’re looking for something that’s more in line with the gaming space, something that’s got its wonky elements, that might even crash (Comixoloy keeps crashing, but I always come back to it) but that still deliver an out of time, out of space experience. If that attention getting element is in place, if it looks good and feels good, much can and will be forgiven. Call of Duty: Black Ops is one of the biggest selling media properties of recent times—and yet the bugs are mentioned on the game blogs as much as the game mechanics. Gamers are demanding, but there’s still a lesson here—digital products aren’t stuck in time, they’re living and breathing, they grow up in front of you and you make them grow up in front of you. But if you try to create something that’s going to emerge fully grown you’re going to get a stunted mutant out of Rage.

And on Rage, I remember when Doom first came out reading a preview of the game in a PC computer magazine where they described how John Romero played with a mouse and how unusual that was. These days, no one would play a first person shooter without a mouse. But can someone write a similar article where Romero shows us how to play an iPad game the right way? Because that would help with these mutants.

Our JFK Vook has been #1 in the Top Paid Book Apps for iPad — and today it climbed to #1 in the Top Grossing Book Apps chart as well. It’s the kind of powerhouse we knew we’d release—but we’re still a little surprised to find we’ve done it. It’s a great app—a testament to the hard work of the people at Perseus and NBC — and a great value: it’s only $6.99 and it’s got reems of footage of JFK that most people have never seen. And the footage’s been polished, restored and assembled into what’s finally a pretty moving title.

We were trying to say something more thoughtful here, but really we’re just pleased. Stephen Elliot, in today’s reliably insightful Daily Rumpus email, had one quote that stuck with us in respect to JFK. He wrote, “All I’ve ever wanted from readers was to be read, but if I printed a thousand books at my own expense and left them lying in cafes that wouldn’t be effective at all. Most readers want to know that someone else was moved enough by the text to invest something of their own.”  (Bold mine for emphasis).

He’s talking about publishers, about the work that goes into getting a book made (I think). Everyone came together on JFK and they created something powerful. People can tell. They buy it. And we think that their trust is rewarded. With JFK, you can see that the people who put this application together were moved enough by its potential to invest the time, energy and consideration into it that they have. We think it shows on every page and we think readers get that. So maybe that’s the solution to succeeding: care a lot — and make sure it really really shows.

Technology, like water and fire, moves in any direction it wants and often with no conscience.

I was recently in Seattle and was overwhelmed by the scale of the six-year old downtown public library.

In 1998, Seattle voters approved the largest library bond issue in US history. The $196 million “Libraries for All” bond measure resulted in an 11-floor, 362,987-square-foot avant-garde Rem Koolhaas-designed extravaganza.

When the library was conceived in 1996, the power of the Internet was just becoming apparent and the forthcoming digital book revolution was nowhere in sight.

Now, it has landed, and questions should be raised about the relevance of a massive structure who’s highest and best use was once warehousing physical books.

The Seattle Public Library board of trustees is working on a strategic plan for the library. The year-long process has been full of opinions, but none seem to be directly asking the fundamental question: the rationale of such an institution when physical books will be obsolete very quickly.

Digital books can now do the job of libraries in a much more efficient and cost effective way. We can expand reading and spread books throughout the world without relying on expensive real estate.

So, what will become of libraries? We will leave that challenge to others.

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Vook was honored to have Matt Thurmond—a member of the TechMedia group at Harvard Business School—invite us to appear on a panel  at their Cyberposium event this past Saturday at HBS. We joined Rick Richter, CEO of Ruckus Media Group, and Allison Dobson, Director, Digital Publishing, of Random House. Professor Rajiv Lal moderated our panel—and, crucially, figured out how to get the iPad projector working.

In the face of top-notch MBAs, we came prepared with figures on ebook publishing, the size of the market and device penetration. But Allison Dobson—an HBS grad—outdid all of us by dropping CAGR in her introduction.

The panel was both insightful and amusing—I hope it passed as quickly for the attendees as it did for us. We wanted to share our key take aways:

• PP&B is publishing lingo for “Paper, Printing and Binding.” Of a book with a $15 list price, about $1.65 of that is probably accounted for by PP&B.
• Rick stressed that digital’s $0 PP&B cost was still definitely advantageous
• All of us agree that video enhancements should serve the story and not create a “circus like” app experience
• Rick sees the greatest conflict in the future of digital publishing being compensation — ie, how do creatives make money off these projects and this new market?
• Ruckus is planning to create a lot of ORIGINAL content — not license or go after pre-existing content.
• Allison’s team did an incredible job on the Decision Points eBook — she demo’d it for the group. Make sure to get it here. Your opinion of Bush will shape your reading experience in a fascinating way. We’ll have another blog post about that soon.
• We all agreed that it’s unlikely that there will be an ereading standard format any time in the next three years.

In the attached photo you can see the cost breakdown of book publishing that Allison provided. We hope the metrics made everyone happy.