Before we jump into reviewing vooks let’s quickly go over what a Vook is -

A Vook is basically a video-book that is 40% video, 40% book and 20% of social networking. There are 4 views -

1. Watch View is videos, approximately one per chapter, that go with the story. You can pull down a layer with the vook text and read while watching the video.
2. Mix View is videos in between the text, just as you would have on a webpage.  
3. Read View is just text.
4. The Social View is something else – there’s a Twitter Stream, ability to post comments, share on Facebook. There’s also information on the author, filmmaker, cast and weblinks.

There are also two good usability options -

1. Change the Font Size.
2. Full Screen Mode.

 It’s definitely different from a book.

Let’s quickly review the 4 vooks that have been released (review copies courtesy Maria at Vook.com).

Promises – A Romance Vook

The video-book integration works really well here.

1. The first video is interesting and the videos in general are well done.
2. The layout is well done and its easy switching between videos and text.  You can read while watching video too.
3. I thought the writing was ok – However, it’s my first romance novel so no idea what’s considered good.  

Would be cool if some romance novel readers chimed in with their feelings.

Score: 8 stars out of 10.

The 90 second fitness solution – Exercise Vook

The intro video is good. The target demographic is women too busy to exercise so it’s not exactly for me.

This perhaps isn’t the best example of a Vook – It’s more like an exercise manual with a few introduction videos and videos for the exercises.

Score: Incomplete.

Return to Beauty – Natural Beauty Vook

If you’re getting the feeling Vook are targeting women you’re not the only one.

1. The first video is cool - a really good introduction.  
2. The concept of the book is pretty cool and the Vook format is ideally suited to it.
3. Not sure why the fitness vook didn’t impress me and this one really does.
4. The videos could have been longer.
5. There are a ton of recipes and ones for each season.
6. This definitely feels like a product I’d pay $6.99 for – well if there was one tailored to men or to health remedies.
7. Do read the last chapter for a home made facial.

Score: 10 out of 10.

This definitely made me feel Vooks have a future.

Embassy – Thriller Vook

Was looking forward to this one and it was worth the time. Its the only one watched in its entirety and here are my thoughts –   

1. The first video is great – love the boots.
2. The hostage in the second video is the most unconvincing hostage ever – Am I going to be on a hostage video? Let me slip into my argyle sweater. It doesn’t help that she looks as if she just spent an hour doing make-up. 
3. It’s a bit confusing - in the flow of reading its difficult to remember to watch the videos.  
4. The plot was just a little too unbelievable – however it kept moving.
5. Definitely worth the time. Is it worth $7? perhaps.

Score: 7 out of 10. Perhaps an 8.

Overall – Vook Review

Movies work. Books work. Will Vooks work?

Based on these 4 Vooks it certainly seems like they might.

Factors working against Vooks -

1. You have to bring together a really good writer, a really good filmmaker and get them on the same page. It just makes things tougher by a factor of 10.
2. If the writing or the movie outshines the other it kills the balance – in the thriller vook the writing is better than the videos (for example, they re-use a police scene).
3. It really is a big, ambitious leap and pretty high risk. 
4. Seems like creating high quality vooks would be very expensive.
5. The Social part isn’t really well designed.

The factors working for Vooks are -

1. A lot of people are much more used to TV and movies and not really having to use their imagination and Vooks will appeal to them. 
2. You can trigger a lot more senses.
3. If used correctly the switches between film and text can be used to create a lot of impact and even to incorporate twists.
4. It allows creators a ton of freedom.
5. The social aspect, when it’s hammered out (perhaps by using something like Google Wave), could help create much stronger connections with readers/viewers.

Overall though, Vook are definitely onto something. Apple have also been pushing something similar to Vooks (basically there are some Apple designers helping out a Vook like project) and some writers have been trying out their own Vook like creations. 

Kudos to Vook for going all out and starting a company that does nothing except create Vooks. There’s a definite future here.

The Templar Legacy

We’re melting here in Seattle. Today we hit a record high of 102 degrees! Guess I’d better run over to Nordstrom and pick up one of these cool summer tees–but which team to choose?

(via The Puget Sound Business Journal)

The return of E. Lockhart!

In The Treasure Map of Boys, E. Lockhart’s first book since National Book Award-Nominated, Tournament of Books contender The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks, the author returns to another unforgettable heroine, Ruby “Roo” Oliver, who we’ve seen before in The Boyfriend List (2005) and The Boy Book (2006). Ruby is a girl with the most common of girl troubles–which boy should she choose? Which girls are really her friends? Why does she have to wear this coat her mom bought her with anchors on it? Ruby cracked me up with her “state of Noboyfriend” and “roly-poly,” her footnotes about David Lee Roth and llamas, and her coup to overthrow the nasty marshmellow snowmen sold every year by the CHuBS (Charity Holiday Bake Sale). Throughout all the slapstick, misflirts, and moments of sadness, Ruby maintains her sense of humor and sense of herself. A truly fun read.

For a representative excerpt of ex-boyfriend encounter hilarity, go here.

Quick links…

This week’s controversy: Justine Larbalestier responds to the complaints about the race of the girl on the cover of her upcoming novel, Liar, which does not match the race of the protagonist. Any chance this will slow the trend of YA covers depicting pretty, thin, white models? One can only hope.

Publisher’s Weekly reports on the controversy.

Trisha of the YA YA YAs follows up with an analysis of Asian-Americans on YA fiction covers.

(Almost every YA blogger commented on this, actually, so fish around the blogs if you want to see more.)

Dear Author interviews Natashya Wilson, editor for Harlequin Teen, which officially launched yesterday with My Soul to Take.

Voila! The cover for Tempted, due out in October, is up on the House of Night website. Preview of chapter one coming soon.
(via YA Booknerd.)

Finding Wonderland tells you how to design your own debut YA novel cover. Here is theirs:

(This game appears to have started at 100 scope notes. Many examples here.)

My debut YA novel is Cinch by Danette G. McClure. I’ll pass on using a photo.

Happy reading.–Heidi

         

 

I talked a little last time about my inspiration for plot coming from the thriller Point Blank. But I write edgy yet humorous fantasy, so over-saturated, blinding bright, slick 70s LA wouldn’t quite work for me in the setting department. I needed somewhere more . . . old to serve as inspiration. Somewhere with swords.

 

My interest in renaissance Italy goes all the way back to playing strategy games on my PC such as Europa Universalis and Medieval Total War. It was always such a patchwork of different coloured little bits and pieces, clustered on such rich ground and surrounded by so many greedy and powerful neighbours. Ah, the idea of uniting those diverse cities under a single armoured heel and forcing them all to march one way. My way.  

I’m joking, of course, Partly. But there’s undoubtedly something fascinating about the melting pot of wildly varying city states that covered the peninsula during the 14th-16th centuries.  

Feuding families, poisonous popes, constant warfare and the threat of invasion by more powerful neighbours, alliances coming and going with the tide, rampaging mercenaries, realpolitik, money and betrayal. The strange mixture of awful destruction and explosive creativity that persisted for a couple of centuries.               

One book that was particularly inspiring to me, and has come to define that period, at least from a political standpoint, is the book that I have made the veritable North Star in all my interpersonal dealings, Machiavelli’s The Prince. It’s intended as a manual for the successful ruler, and it’s so very dark, so very realistic, so very unheroic:  

No, not originally from Robert de Niro’s Bronx Tale, straight from Machiavelli.   

“those princes who have done great things have held good faith of little account, and have known how to circumvent the intellect of men by craft, and in the end have overcome those who have relied on their word.”   

The antithesis of the classic ideas of honourable leadership that seemed to permeate so much of epic fantasy in its 80s heyday.   

There’s more, so much more. It’s the sort of stuff the villains would usually say to justify themselves.  And those are my kind of characters. Borgias and Sforzas, Medicis and Viscontis. There’s also, of course, a grand tradition of Italianate revenge tragedies, like, well, The Revenger’s Tragedy (no, really?) and The Duchess of Malfi. So, all in all, renaissance Italy seemed the ideal inspiration for the setting of a fantasy revenge tale…