Apple’s iTunes Rewind 2010 lists are a great cheat sheet for gift giving—they summarize the “best of” products in various iTunes and iBookstore categories. But after reading it yesterday, we realized we won’t be needing any gifts this year: Apple chose THREE of our Vooks as the Best Enhanced Titles of 2010. Apple are the kings of curation when it comes to great content, so this is a big honor for us. It validates all the work we’ve done on our products and all the love and care we’ve put into making a stellar enhanced experience.

The complete list is below:

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, by CS Lewis

War, by Sebastian Junger

The Breakaway Japanese Kitchen, Eric Gower

Reckless Road: Guns ‘N Roses, Marc Canter and Jason Porath

Nixonland, Rick Perlstein

Louder than Words, Joe Navarro

I seem to start a lot of emails and posts with the line “we’re incredibly pleased . . .” but that’s the kind of problem I like having. And now I have to deal with it again because MediaBistro’s eBookNewser has named our Crush It! Vook one of the top ten eBooks of 2010. Crush It! is a title near and dear to our hearts — and one of our top performers — so we were incredibly pleased to see it make the list. I still have vivid memories of being questioned by the police after trying to follow Gary Vaynerchuk into the Meadowlands Stadium with my camera — oh those heady early start up days where you give your elevator pitch to an anti-terror task force — and much of our production team works under the eyes of a framed poster of Gary on the Vook’s cover hanging in our Alameda office. The Crush It! Vook is Vook at its best. Though we’ve improved in leaps and bounds since our launch, it still speaks to our core mission: pairing a great author (Gary) with a great filmmaker (Lauren Saffa) to create something new and wonderful.

And of course we’re incredibly pleased that eBookNewser agrees.

I’m part of the NY Tech Meet Up message board. Today was my second posting — previously I raised a question about Minecraft (specifically, WTF is the plot mechanism of this thing) so my contributions on digital publishing and magazine apps hopefully will improve my profile. The line of discussion was familiar: do people want to subscribe for content on iPad, do you just duplicate the content in a real world vehicle for digital, should the iPad reading experience be unique, etc.

I brought up the Baker Framework. I’ve been trying to build an ebook in Baker late at night but I’m still figuring out the Webkit part. I think the Baker Framework is going to be something like our MotherVook platform (the technology engine we’ve built that lets us create a multiplicity of enhanced digital book formats), but Open Source, maybe trickier to use, maybe less versatile. I’m unsure. I like the idea. And I like the example Baker has on its site.

I think the tools for creating rich experiences on iPad are going to become more ubiquitious, more accessible. FinalCut allowed people like me to make a living as video producers independently. Services like Baker could potentially do the same for app production and development. What does that mean for Vook?  Good things. I was looking at our top titles recently. Most of them featured a lot of great new content that we at Vook produced, whether with design work (JFK) or with original video production. The fact that we’ve produced so many titles also sets us apart. The ability to create strong original content on a larger scale is going to be a differentiator—and it’s going to be the thing I couldn’t have pulled off from a kitchen office.