Vook
I’ve been on the e-mailing list for “Vook” for a while now – I can’t even remember how I got to hear about it in the first place – and I thought the e-mail below might be of interest. I’ve just purchased and taken a quick look at Embassy, one of the four inaugural Vook titles (the others are a historical romance, a fitness manual and a book of beauty tips): it’s nothing special, at a quick glance; lots of text and not much video; the videos look as if they’re trying to skirt around the fact that they don’t have any decent actors and don’t want to use dialogue (although I haven’t looked at them all yet); and the effect of introducing them into the text (in a not-very-well integrated way) is distracting rather than gripping. On the plus side, however, the presentation and packaging are (as you would expect) pretty slick: layout super-clean, text nice and readable, user interface extremely friendly. The New York Times, which has published a big article about Vook, has a slight history of bigging up new developments of this kind: they published a similarly overexcited article about Eric Brown’s e-mail novel Intimacies in 2004, and a writeup about Vook when the brand-name was first launched in April this year. Still, if big companies keep taking an interest in this kind of thing, sooner or later they’re going to get the formula right, or at least close enough to make some money instead of losing a bundle – and then where does that leave the rest of us? Banging on the doors of Vook HQ and shouting “Let me in! I know all about this! I’ve been doing it for years!” – or hugging our experimentalist credentials to our chests, refusing to sell out, and pouring scorn on these commercial products because they’re not the real deal?
- Edward Picot
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5 Responses to “Vook”.
What media can it handle, Edward? Text and video? Does it have a scripting language? Like HTML has Javascript and Flash has Actionscript and Director has Lingo and so forth.
It looks like just text and video, Jim, at a quick glance. I’m not too sure how it’s constructed, either: you can either buy a web version or a download for your i-pod, if that’s any clue.
Edward–We’ll just keep offering what we do for free. That ought to bring an audience!
In other words, Alan, we should carry on doing what we’re doing. I’m sure that’s right. It’s a slightly rattling thought that if this were to stick (and from what I’ve seen of it, I’m not at all sure that it will) we could go overnight from being moderately-sized fish in a small pond to tiny little fish in a great big pond, and the big pond dominated by big-money players; but I suppose we might get the benefit of some extra attention.
Another way of looking at it is that Simon and Schuster’s willingness to experiment with new media is indicative of their nervousness about the future of print. If you read the New York Times article, what they’re trying to do is grab some of the audience which is currently giving print the go-by and going to places like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter for its entertainment. Hence the “social networking” aspect of Vooks, which otherwise seems to have very little connection with their content.
My feeling is that traditional print publishing is in a state of turmoil. So many people are now buying books online that High Street bookstores can now only afford to stock big-selling titles, which means that the marketplace is increasingly dominated by film, television and celebrity tie-ins. Online, on the other hand, as a result of the Long Tail, Amazon will stock absolutely anything, because they don’t have to physically stock it at all, which means no overheads. As a result of this, the online marketplace is increasingly flooded by self-published titles which sell in tiny numbers. It seems likely that in ten years from now the commercial publishing industry will have completely given up trying to “discover” new authors: they’ll confine themselves to publishing the book of the TV cooking series, the autobiography of the sporting celebrity, the latest book by an author who has already sold millions, and so forth – and the only way any new blood will get into the system will be if people have already managed to sell lots of copies of their self-published work, whereupon they will be seen as a safe bet and offered a contract.
Where does this leave hyperliterature? Probably in the same position as all other forms of creative writing. If you can demonstrate through your own efforts that your work can command a sufficiently large audience, someone will come out of the woodwork to offer you offer you money for it. You then have to make up your mind whether you want to tell them to get stuffed, and carry on as you are, or run for cover and buy yourself a house. It would be nice to think that efforts to foist hyperliterature best-sellers on the marketplace top-down, through a combination of slick technology and heavyweight marketing techniques, will go belly-up of their own accord. On the other hand, it worked for Harry Potter. If something gets enough publicity, it doesn’t have to be great – it just has to be good enough.
I’m not sure that we’ll ever need to go banging on the doors of the likes of Vook HQ or Simon and Schuster. Should any of us come up with a ‘monetizable’ work of elit, what’s to stop us selling it ourselves? Perhaps via an elit version of something like http://www.etsy.com (elitsy.com?) Or maybe we’re already sitting in the pot at the end of the rainbow: http://www.gamesbrief.com/2009/10/two-reasons-why-facebook-is-about-to-become-bigger-than-google/
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