ePublishing Leader Vook Announces Over 500 Titles Produced in Successful Private Beta and Winners of Its eBook Creation Contest

NEW YORK, Feb. 14, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Vook, the leading ePublishing technology platform that's produced over 1,250 eBooks leading to 3.3 million downloads, today announced winners of the eBook Creation Contest for its closed beta users, who have produced more than 584 unique eBooks in the platform. The winner of the "Best Overall eBook" was Brian Brushwood's "Scam School: Volume 1," a collection of a magician's best tricks and cons. User Joey O'Connor of the The Grove Center for the Arts & Media won the "Best Designed" eBook with "Create: Transforming Stories of Art, Life and Faith" and Stephen B. Lewis won the "Best Content" eBook for "Pocket Stones," written by Barbara-Ann G. Lewis and illustrated by Barbara Pollak.

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Having created titles for some of the largest publishing houses, such as Simon & Schuster, Hachette, and Penguin, Vook is now providing its platform directly to partners and independent ePublishing professionals, giving everyone the power to create eBooks simply, efficiently and effectively, allowing media companies, authors, agents and others to become digital publishers.

Vook has completely re-vamped its platform, focusing on solving the thorny problems that arise when creating eBooks. Vook features improved authoring and ingestion tools that make it easy to transform any type of content, from blogs, to longform journalism, and even television, into an eBook. Vook has simplified the complex process of eBook production with new tools such as custom eBook styling, support for audio and video enhancements, real time QA, and the push-button "everywhere" distribution of eBooks for Amazon, iBooks and Barnes and Noble.

Vook spent the last 90 days in private beta. 500 users identified 200 bugs that Vook engineers furiously squashed and 31 feature recommendations that Vook implemented.

The users were a diverse mix of content creators.

• 31% Authors, Bloggers & other individual content owners
• 20% Small Publishers
• 18% Medium Publishers
• 16% News-Related
• 6% Television Networks and Video Companies

In three months, they produced 584 titles.

"We used the Vook platform to quickly create Mark Cuban's eBook How to Win at the Sport of Business in only a few hours," said literary agent Scott Waxman, founder of Diversion Books, an early Vook partner. "With Vook, we can create eBooks with more control and great attention to quality."

Using Vook, "I launched my eBook, 'Paris Pastry Guide.' I sell it in ePub and mobi formats directly to the public and quickly sold 225 copies. I am very happy with Vook," said Heather Stimmler-Hall.

Vook delivers a multitude of enhanced features to give eBook creators a superior experience. Some of the top line features include:

• File conversion - a thorny issue for publishers that Vook has worked hard to solve. The new platform converts files on the fly, while preserving a majority of style and text formatting.
• Innovative styling tools that allow publishers to take the look of an eBook from average and ordinary to extraordinary.
• Easy enhancements are core to Vook's functionality. Vook is the leader in allowing users to easily add audio, videos and images to create enhanced eBooks.
• Real time title rendering lets you see your eBook with the styling you've created and applied, and watch your adjustments take effect in front of you.
• Distribution ready files produced for B&N, Amazon and the iBookstore along with many more etailers to come. Integrated epubcheck functionality makes sure files are bug-free.
• Instant eBooks - You want to start writing a book? Well, start actually writing a book. Vook lets you begin creating your content in the final form it's going to take as a digital book.

Vook has signed on a series of powerful and influential partners to use its ePublishing platform including Franklin Covey and HayHouse.

"This is just the beginning, as we begin spreading the Vook technology far and wide," said Vook CEO Brad Inman. "We will enable a wide variety of creators, producers and publishers to create exceptional eBooks and spread them everywhere."

About Vook: Vook has created the leading ePublishing platform, Vook. With Vook, it's easy to create and enhance great looking eBooks, distribute them to leading marketplaces, and track their sales. The platform has created eBooks for leading publishers and content owners including the Harvard Business Review, Google, and Hay House, and noted authors including Seth Godin, Anne Rice and Deepak Chopra. You can learn more about the Vook Platform here: http://vimeo.com/36650863. For more information and to joining the Vook beta, please visit http://www.vook.com.

About Joey O'Connor's Create: Transforming Stories of Art, Life & Faith
This is a compilation of essays from artists and writers. Gorgeous images of paintings and videos. Each chapter begins with a beautiful initial letter, set as a drop cap with text wrapping around it.

About Pocket Stones, written by Barbara-Ann G. Lewis and illustrated by Barbara Pollak; created in Vook by Stephen B. Lewis 
Pocket Stones is a collection of short stories about a young girl growing up in WW-II era Philippines. Each story is a short gem of personal history mixed with world history, all written with a concise, light touch. The book also has beautiful illustrations!

About Brian Brushwood's Scam School: Volume 1 
Scam School is a collection of magician Brian Brushwood's best tricks and cons. It is the most feature laden eBook on Vook: images, video, audio, internal links to other chapters, external links to the web. The styling is thematic (titles and images are made to look like they're from an old notebook) and full of flourishes. 

SOURCE Vook