I went into New York yesterday to attend Publishing Point’s Vook meetup. Their presentations have been getting more and more interesting, so if you are in the New York area take a look. The presentation was made by Brad Inman, Vook’s CEO.
Basic concept: filmmakers and authors come together. Filmmakers come from a network set up under the name of Turn Here. Feels that Apple will give tools to creators to make new things that go over and above ebooks and enhanced ebooks. Apple already did this with graphic design and music.
Very interested in the education area. Can read and watch at the same time. Surveys show that many readers like to do both. Primary sales channel is iPhone: 7 to 1 over the browser and working on an iPad version.
Mixed media will be like adding sound to movies, especially with Apple. Have nothing today in devices that emulates the power and utility of the printed book, but something will come along and then things will take off. How they think about growth of Vook: discovery phase, then move on to early adopters, then to proof of concept and then scale up. With the digital work can actually find out what people are doing in each phase.
This is not a form that people instantly “get” so getting influencers to advocate it is important for marketing.
What they’ve learned: readers want mixed media content, hard for publishers and authors to create mixed media, no in-hose mixed media creative teams, rights roadblocks, no industry scalable technology, video opportunities endless.
Good medium to take books out of backlist, update them and turn them into mixed media. Pick right media, very good for serial rights. Thinks that this medium should be a shorter form than “movies”. On web stuff tends to be short and people are used to that.
The full presentation will be up on the Publishing Point site if you’re interested.
Note the picture. The presentation was recorded and I’m afraid that no form of ebooks, no matter how innovative, could prop up the camera as well as these pbooks did. One benefit of having the meeting at Hachette.
