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Technology

Rethinking the Book

It’s a Book, It’s a Video — It’s a Vook

    In an interview with the New York Times in January 2008, Apple CEO Steve Jobs predicted that Amazon’s new Kindle reader would fail because “people don’t read anymore. Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.” For most people, that was proof that his company would never bring out a competitor
to Amazon’s popular book reader — if people aren’t reading books anyway, why create a device to help them continue not reading them?
     Fast forward exactly two years (more than a generation in technological terms), and the iPad is introduced by Jobs while he settled into an overstuffed chair, holding the new tablet in a way similar to the way one might a magazine such as this, folded in half. It came with an application called iBooks that allows users to download electronic books from a growing library in the iTunes Store, and the ad campaign now markets the iPad as a competent book reader that can hold a seemingly infinite number of titles. But like its smartphone predecessor the iPhone, it can also play music and videos in high definition. Sure, it’s a book reader. But is re-creating words on a page really the apex of achievement for this new Jesus device? For that matter, are words on a page the end of the line for books?
     An Alameda-based entrepreneur named Brad Inman doesn’t think so. Inman, a serial Internet entrepreneur who has started companies in real estate publishing and lead generation and internet video production, started a company in 2008 to augment e-books with video — called, you guessed it, Vook. Each Vook is a separate app downloadable from the iTunes app store. Download a Sherlock Holmes classic and watch a dramatization of a scene, or an interview with an Arthur Conan Doyle expert. Get a new Anne Rice story and with it videos of her annotating the scenes. Buy a weight-loss Vook and watch the author cook in his own kitchen. Titles are typically $4.99 apiece, though classic titles and “lite” versions can be free or $1.99. “This is an enhanced e-book,” says Inman. “We’re adding interactivity to books; you can equate it to the advent of the talkies in the ’20s and DOS to Windows. We’re rethinking the book.”
     Vooks in practice look like photos in a magazine article, with the text flowing around the embedded video or photos, but the videos can all be watched on their own from the main menu. The titles in the nearly 100-title Vook canon tilt heavily toward self help, spirituality and business, but the company is working with existing and first-time authors to bring their books first to the Vook. Vook has added some classic titles, like Sherlock Holmes, and some children’s books, including Jack and the Beanstalk, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and The Three Little Pigs. Vook is working with four publishers now, including Simon & Schuster and HarperStudio, with around 100 in the works, according to Inman. In February the company received $2.5 million in seed funding from a group of independent investors.
     Part of the company’s strategy is to provide new life for older titles (with video usually provided by one of Inman’s previous startups, TurnHere, an online video production company he started in 2005), ones that might be out of print or just simply not selling much any more. It can also take one book and turn it into several bite-sized pieces that can be sold individually, turning a single potential sale into several. By adding video tutorials, for example, Vook was able to turn Jim McLean’s The Eight-Step Swing golf tutorial into eight downloadable Vooks, each priced at $4.99. “You can convert a physical book into bite-sized media now,” says Inman. “The form is changing and also the
business model.”
     Before the introduction of the iPad, say in 2009, there are those who would have said that the book in its natural state — bulky, single purpose, text heavy — is a feature, not a bug. That is what has made it such an enduring format, one that helped usher Europe out of the middle ages in the 15th century. In other words, is the book something that needs improving? Sure, 90 Second Fitness could probably benefit from a video tutorial, but does Kafka’s The Metamorphosis need a Vookover?
     Inman is quick to point out that the reading of a book doesn’t have to suffer because there are videos present, and because the Vook lives on a multimedia device, it gives readers a chance to see and hear from the book’s creator. “People really want to connect with their authors in a more visual way, and also with each other. Vooks are visual, rich media, and the beauty of the Internet and the iPad is that we can do a lot of cool things now.”
     The promise of adding rich media and interactivity to books or novels or textbooks is that instead of being cast in a moment of time — the print date — they can be updated on the fly with new information, demonstrate movement or rotate around illustrations. By adding video to books, Vook is taking the first step toward using the full multimedia capability of tablet PCs. Will this trend eventually kill traditional book publishing or have printed books always been dead on arrival?