Apr
17
“Vook, I am your father.”
April 17, 2009 | 1 Comment
Have you noticed that there is a space to add quotes on your Facebook profile? Quotes are the quintessential short attention span reading pleasure. And thanks to all the digital fidgeting in my daily life, my attention span is pretty slight these days. So, I’ve been making a point of putting some literary quotes in that Facebook space – mainly as a quick way to inhale some bookish words whilst doing eighteen other things online. Here is today’s micro read:
“If there’s no money in poetry, neither is there poetry in money.”
~ Robert Ranke Graves (1895-1985)
Speaking of money, and compromised attention spans, meet the Vook. Welcome to the digital book market, I think? Can you imagine what will happen to our ability to comprehend plain old boring words once our books have video and twitter built in? Several people of lofty minds are grumbling in their graves right now.
Is This the Future of the Digital Book?
By Brad Stone (nytimes.com)
“PLENTY of authors dream of writing the great American novel.
Bradley Inman is starting Vook, a platform for e-books that will combine text, video and social networking.
Bradley Inman wants to create great fiction, dramatic online video and compelling Twitter stream — and then roll them all into a multimedia hybrid that is tailored to the rapidly growing number of digital reading devices.
Mr. Inman, a successful Silicon Valley entrepreneur, calls this digital amalgam a “Vook,†(vook.tv) and the fledgling company he has created with that name just might represent a possible future for the beleaguered book industry.
Publishing, of course, is feeling the same chronic pain as other media businesses, with layoffs, corporate restructurings and a general sense of gloom, doom and kaboom settling over name-brand giants like Random House and Simon & Schuster.
At the same time, there has been a flurry of optimism and activity around the once-derided idea that people might read books on a digital screen. Just this year, new electronic reading devices have emerged from Amazon, Samsung and Fujitsu, while mobile phones like iPhone from Apple have flowered seemingly overnight into acceptable reading devices for many bookworms.
And just as digital media have begun to change the nature of news, music and video, the emergence of e-books is causing various entrepreneurs and technologists to reconsider the kind of experience that books might one day deliver…”
[the rest, here]
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