Vook Closes $5.25 Million

Press Release: "NEW YORK, NY – January 18, 2011 – Vook, the leading digital publisher of mixed-media reading, announced it closed $5.25 million in Series A financing from investors including VantagePoint Venture Partners and Floodgate. Vook will use the proceeds to build on its momentum, accelerate sales and invest in technology to support its growth plans. ... "

President Bush’s Enhanced Book Memoir - Multimedia Shock & Awe - Just Like Being There

Mediabistro: "The memoirs of the 43rd President of the USA will be released on 9 November. Normally I wouldn’t have noticed, but I just learned that there will be 2 ebook editions. One will be enhanced with source content."

French Enhanced eBook Teaches Photoshop with Interactivity, Text and Video

Tutorials are, of course, a natural for enhanced books. theBookseller.com: "Editions Eyrolles has unveiled what it claims to be the first French enhanced e-book. Photoshop Elements, Special Debutants [for beginners] by Cyril Bruneau and Bernard Richebe, includes 45 minutes of educational videos and was conceived as a tutorial composed of practical files, the company said. The aim is to 'give a real added value to professional works, where a savoir-faire in a given field needs to be demonstrated and explained,' the publisher said."

EnkHouse Brings New Take on Enhanced E-books

Publishers Weekly: "Things are moving fast in the digital book world, but perhaps no one is moving faster than David Marlett. With a background in law, film, and business, Marlett has put together a series of partnerships to develop enhanced e-books and apps through the newly formed enkHouse. EnkHouse is the digital division of the Dallas, Tex., self-publishing house Brown Books Publishing Group. The company has just signed a deal with KiwiTech, the new company of Aptara founder Rakesh Gupta and the developer of Penguin's amplified e-book Pillars of the Earth. According to Marlett, transmedia producer at enkHouse, pitches for projects are coming so fast, 'it's all about picking which rabbit to chase.'"

Pat Conroy and the E-Book Future - AP

Hillel Italie:

Conroy is a good example of the divided state of electronic books. With standard contracts now including digital rights, e-editions of his recent works — from "South of Broad" to a memoir out this fall, "My Reading Life" — are handled by Random House, Inc., which also releases the bound versions. Meanwhile, rights to his older books have shifted among outside companies.

The Open Road releases were first published by Houghton Mifflin (now Harcourt Houghton Mifflin), but came out before the rise of e-books, when many contracts did not specifically cover rights to electronic editions. ...

Conroy and his agent, Marlee Rusoff, both say the major appeal of Open Road was not royalties, although Open Road almost surely is offering more than the 25 percent most publishers give, but how the books would be packaged and promoted.

For several years, "Prince of Tides" was released through a licensing agreement with rival digital publisher, Rosetta Books. But after the Rosetta contract expired, Rusoff thought it better to try a new company.

"Nothing had been done to promote the books; they were languishing, I felt," Rusoff says. "What made me introduce Pat to the people at Open Road was the visual element of their books. I think that can enhance the experience. None of that was happening at Rosetta."

"Did I want to renew this license? The answer is 'Yes,' says Rosetta founder Arthur Klebanoff, who has fought with Random House over rights to older titles. "But until the arrival of the Kindle, you had a tiny, tiny marketplace. That has changed dramatically over the last 12 years, but if you're an agent looking for results and you were hanging around with Rosetta for nine years, it looks like there's no action." ...

A Different Kind Of Reading

Publishers Weekly:

Forgive me for starting out all high-falutin', but an anecdote I heard about the late, great critic Susan Sontag makes for a good way into this consideration of four new, enhanced e-books.

A decade ago, Sontag was walking with a friend through the glowing, neon streets of Tokyo, a place like a series of contiguous Times Squares, when she suddenly looked up at the endlessly distracting electric city and exclaimed in dismay, "It's the end of reading!"

Sontag, one of the great advocates of the written word, unknowingly anticipated the fear of many book lovers about the dawning of digital books: will reading on screens, our e-books spliced with video, links, and other gizmos, turn the concentrated act and escape of reading into something diluted and distracting?

Based on four just-released enhanced e-books from HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Penguin, and Hyperion, that's not likely to happen. ...

Enhanced Editions, Vooks, Amplified Books ...

Of course, "enhanced books," "vooks," etc. are ideal for tablets and nonstarters for eReaders such as Nook and Kindle, which are not designed to handle multimedia. But this fact is not a death knell for eReaders as a class of devices, especially as these become steadily cheaper, elegant, compact and efficient. I can easily see myself traveling with a tablet in my briefcase and an eReader in my breast pocket. I don't always want or need multimedia. Sometimes I just want to curl up with a good book, and to do so without digging out the tablet. The simple eReader e-Ink screens are MUCH easier on the eyes when it comes to extended reading.

Multimedia E-Books, Adorned With Video Extras - NYTimes.com: "Penguin Group released an 'amplified' version of a novel by Ken Follett last week. And on Thursday Simon & Schuster will come out with one of its own, an 'enhanced' e-book version of 'Nixonland' by Rick Perlstein. All of them go beyond the simple black-and-white e-book that digitally mirrors its ink-and-paper predecessor. The new multimedia books use video that is integrated with text, and they are best read — and watched — on an iPad, the tablet device that has created vast possibilities for book publishers."