For those of you who aren’t gamers or don’t keep reddit open in a browser tab, Game of Thrones isn’t the only property turning television screens into Scandanvian Renaissance Festivals. Video game company Bethesda Software recently released Skyrim, an incredibly detailed, open world role playing game that shipped 3.4 million copies in 2 days and scored a 96 point overall average on review aggregator Metacritic.

It’s a definite blockbuster hit, but is it another reason for fantasy lovers to turn away from literature? Hardly. Skyrim’s littered with books — from romance novels to religious books to spell tomes to journals to straight fiction. You can pick up books, carry them around, deposit them in your house and read them in-game, paging through what’s estimated to be a thousand plus pages of actual text.  It’s that weird, possibly too potent perfect time-suck — a fantasy video game stocked with fantasy books that you read as a fantasy character you created.

Of course, it’s a self-limiting audience—even if we’re living post triumph of the nerds, most people are still adopting to digital books instead of actually fantastical digital books. But it’s interesting that Skyrim’s developers saw the potential to populate their world with books — a real life case of transmedia storytelling that doesn’t feel tacked on, but natural, even necessary.

Just a few days ago, I was discussing at Vook how video game companies – like Bethesda – could use Vook to produce eBook versions of their in-game lore. Sure, the audience is niche, but it’s an audience that’s committed. And when you make it as easy to create an eBook as Vook does, why would you skip the opportunity?

That’s the future of publishing. Or at least one path of the future. Companies who have rich, deep, intricate stories that don’t exist in “real-world” book form will start producing books independently. And if they have an audience they can reach digitally — they have a bookstore too.

We’re not the only ones with the idea. Metafilter today alerted me that the blogger behind capane.us had turned all of Skyrim’s in-game books into actual eBooks for the Mobi and ePub format.

It should send a message to video game and media companies everywhere: If your own users are hacking your content into book format, shouldn’t you put them together yourself? Email us at Vook today at Matthew@vook.com. Or just hang tight — we’ll be knocking on your door soon.

Video games have supposedly lost their nerdy stigma, (thanks to Rockstar and Angry Birds and the Wii yes, but you can’t anticipate $70 billion in revenue by 2015 and not look a little grown up) but I still find myself referencing Tom Bissel’s journalism and Jason Rohrer’s art games when the conversation turns to what many people continue thinking of as nazi/zombie wasting adolescent pachinko. But gaming’s grown up and in possession of analytic insight that could interest even that most mature institution—publishing. I’m not referencing a new app based on the Wasteland or an update of Ubik (Jonathan Lethem why was the Library of America PKD not enhanced with Cryo’s classic?) but Valve co-founder Gabe Newell’s excellent digression on price testing in video games. As Newell says, “There’s probably going to be lessons in it for other people trying to create value on the Internet.”

Gabe Newell is a co-founder of Valve, creator of game franchises such as Half-Life and Portal. Geekwire today published an excellent recap of Newell’s insight on how his company, who distribute games digitally through their online Steam storefront, tested price elasticity, consumer demand, ideal price points and freemium models.

Sounds like Amazon price testing writ in gibs, to me.

Newell goes into some detail about how Valve, watching daily sales in a controlled test, thought they’d determined that pricing for their titles was perfectly elastic, that gross revenue remained constant no matter how they changed price. But then they varied their formula and sharply dropped prices and saw revenue increase by a factor of 40. They thought they were just time shifting sales, ie, encouraging people who would buy in the future to buy immediately, but further tests proved the reality was more elusive and more complicated.

You should read the post to get the gritty details – but the big take away is that a promoted sale and price drop increase sales at the time of promotion and create a longer term effect of increased sales after the promotion. This, Valve thinks, has something to do with users being more reliable drivers of revenue and additional sales than promotion or marketing. Furthermore, Valve has been experiementing with “free to play” branding. It’s a subtle distinction from “free”. They’re finding that companies that offer games designed to be “free” with an upsell to paid services often have a 2 to 3 percent conversion rate. But games marketed as “free-to-play” that offer a richer experience are seeing a 20-30 percent conversion rate of users who buy additional services.

The core observation is more of a question Newell poses: “Why is free and free to play so different? Well then you have to start thinking about how value creation actually occurs, and what it is that people are valuing, and what the statement that something is free to play implies about the future value of the experience that they’re going to have.”

Newell should write a book — and why not, he should use Vook to do it — but maybe a better course would be for the distribution and pricing minded to register for Steam accounts.

tl;dr: How to succeed in business: Delete Facebook, hit the gym, stop playing video games but listen to the founders/programmers/thought leaders when they talk about pricing, or just about anything.