reader.ly

With apologies to Dr. Seuss, the name Vook is so absurd that it sounds like something out of One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish. Vook is actually the name of a company established last year “with the vision to unite the disparate worlds of books and videos into one complete, blended story.” Hence, vooks, online books that you can buy (currently from Simon & Schuster) with video segments incorporated into the text. There are four titles available today: The 90 Second Fitness Solution and Return to Beauty: Old-World Recipes for Great Radiant Skin, both non-fiction, and Promises by Jude Deveraux and Embassy, a thriller by Richard Doetsch.

I can see how video segments might complement self-improvement books, cookbooks, travel guides, how-to manuals and some text books. Video examples of positive discipline methods for toddlers or how to properly caramelize creme brulee, for example, could have saved me countless hours of frustration. Fiction, however, feels different. There are many film adaptations of novels that are brilliant — Atonement, The Hours, The Lord of the Rings trilogy — yet even the best ones have to sacrifice some amount of detail and complexity in order to create a coherent, approximately 2 hour movie.

So to give fiction vooks a fair shot, I bought Embassy this afternoon and read it (vead it?) online. On the plus side, you don’t have to download any software since the vook uses flash. The layout appears like an open book. You can read the text with the video player fixed on the left page while the text advances on the right, or have the text appear on both left and right pages. Clicking on forward and backward icons is the only means of navigating through the book, and oddly, there are no page numbers or progress bars or percentage complete indicators. Compressed video screens are interspersed like thin banners throughout the text; once you click it, the video expands to full screen. When the video ends, you can replay or return to the text.

The Vook people apparently feel that readers need to be encouraged to “get more out of your vook” as they like to reiterate throughout. Each video banner features a cutout of a screenshot, a large play button, and either a title or a call to action such as “See what happened next” or “Why he wants it.” Rather than enhancing the story, the videos interrupt the story, which on its own already strained credulity.

Most of the videos in Embassy are there to set the mood, in this case “tense.” The directors therefore chose “ominous” music, lots of close-ups of NYC police cars, hand-held cameras, and actors who specialize in a single look: scared, angry, or mysterious. In other words, they resemble the stereotypical film school project — poor lighting, shaky cameras, and little dialogue. Considering the results when the actors have to deliver lines, it might have been better to stick to the atmospheric vignettes. The segment where the mysterious guy delivers a raspy monologue explaining his motives (and central driver of the plot), occasionally biting the bandanna into which he seems to be coughing his last breath, is unfortunately more Windy City Heat than The Godfather.

I’m not sure how much blame you can lay on the author for this fiasco. Yes, he agreed to it and appears in an embarrassing video at the end of the vook (but hey! You can Connect with the author and other readers via links to your favorite social networking sites!). My problem lies more with the concept of the vook itself, at least for fiction. The creators of the vook are aiming to expand the market of people who read and buy books by making them easily downloadable, i.e., accessible to the wired generation. They’re also assuming — and reinforcing — a diminished capacity to concentrate enough to read a novel. Call me a Luddite, but I refuse to believe that young people can’t sit still for an hour to read a book (paper or digital) without having video snippets scattered like candy throughout the text to coax them along to the next page. Reading requires you to use your imagination to picture the characters and scenes, and a great story will pull you in so deeply that you forget where you are.

A vook doesn’t let you forget that you’re on your computer. Even aside from the clicking on the video banners (which given my avoidance of online banner ads feels unnatural), once you begin to visualize a scene in your head, the video reminds you that the director’s vision, however overwrought, is the one to watch. I guess I should be thankful that Vook drew the line at video; if Jude Deveraux, the author of romance vook Promises had her way, vooks would include music and perfume “to engage all the senses.”