What Is A Vook?

First of all, thanks to everyone for helping me spread the word about the book trailer for my new contest. I’m announcing the winner later this week!

I hadn’t planned a blog post for the weekend but this one just dropped in to my lap–and when the muse of blogging (Blog-alliope?) gets in a snit she must be appeased.

I got an email from my brother the other day and I just had to share it with you. Here’s the whole of the email:

Vook. Weird name: http://promo.simonandschuster.com/vook.

So, if you’re like me, you’re thinking, “What the vook is a vook?”

A vook is the newest in interactive reading. It’s a digital book–an e-book–and you can watch key scenes of the book acted out for you. You can also connect with other people reading the vook via social networking.

Here’s the official book trailer–I mean vook trailer–from S&S.

So is it video? Is it a book? Nope, it’s a vook (because apparently “bideo” was even more awkward than “vook”).

The whole concept of a vook seems very surreal to me, like if a vook could talk to a roomful of books, it would say Greetings, unenlightened tomes of ages past. I’m you from the future. Wow, the rumors are true! You guys really do stink like feet. Pew! But don’t worry. In the future you (I) don’t have to worry about BO and brittle spines. Soon, you’ll transcend your physical form to find digital enlightenment!  

For nonfiction, a vook makes great sense to me. I’d love to be able to push “play” in Wordpress for Dummies to see how I’m actually supposed to fix this silly API error.

But for fiction I’m not so sure.

Imagine if you were reading Pride and Prejudice…you’re reading along, and then when you get to the scene where Darcy proposes, you can press “play” and watch it.

Or, you’re reading Twilight and Edward pushes Bella out of the way of a car, and after you “see” it in your imagination you can go on to see it on screen. (I wonder if they’d just use clips from the movie?)

Or say you’re reading a juicy Hannah Howell novel and you get to the part where the Highland warrior can no longer resist the temptation of his fair-haired heroine, and so he–I’m just going to stop here. You know where this is going.

For me, books (even e-books to a certain extent) are a kind of sanctuary from being plugged into visual images. The experience of a scene is richer and more intense when it’s not flattened out on a television screen.

The other thing to consider is that screenwriting and book-writing are extremely different! A novelist doesn’t write dialogue for the sake of having it acted out; she writes it in a very specific way that is meant to engage the individual’s imagination through text alone. In other words, book dialogue is different than TV dialogue. Will they change the language for a vook?

It’s hard to say if vooks are a tactic to generate PR, or if this is a commendable effort by a publishing house to bring in new readers who are more comfortable with TV than with text. Whatever the backstory, vooks are a sign that the publishing industry is on the brink of change. And since no one quite knows what that change will be, the guesses just keep getting weirder and weirder.

Perhaps the next big advance in books will be books you don’t have to read at all. And here’s an idea, we can call them movies.

In the meantime, Simon & Schuster, I would just like to let you know that if you’d like to make any of my books into a vook, I’d be thrilled to oblige.

LOVE TO READERS: Would you read a vook? What’s your take on all of this? Are you plugging in to the digitial book revolution?

Tagged as: Lisa Dale, Lisa Dale Blog, what is a vook