Plenty of authors dream of writing the great American novel.
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.
There is so much wrong with this idea — and I realize that the Times never gets anything right — that I can only think of two words in response:
Market research.
Print is dead. The book as a transmission medium, with or without print, is dead. Marrying books to video makes great sense — for comic books: DC, Marvel and the entire graphic novel business have never had things better. Adding video to actual books is just dumb. And blending “social media” into the batter is just twitter-brained echo-chamber cargo-cultism.
Here’s the real deal, and the talisman that reveals that Brad Inman is anything but a successful Silicon Valley entrepreneur:
Every dinosaur in the land is thrashing about, looking for a way to create a mass-media product that can be locked behind a paywall, thus to force the punters to cough up the dough like they always have in the past.
Welcome to our world, Brad, which you quite clearly have never understood.
I do want to give Inman credit for a new invention, though. The “vook” (yikes!) is not dead on arrival. It’s dead before arrival. It stalks the night, a zombie of the mind, with its only reality, perhaps, being an unfinished web site and a gushing article in the notoriously useless New York Times. But this is not for naught. The “vook” will never live, but Brad Inman has inadvertently created a new category of hi-tech start-ups: The Undead Pool.
