Bernard Goldbach in Thurles | 430 words
I ORDERED MY FIRST VOOK today, a fun read from Brian Brushwood. I'm sure it deserves top billing as the best Vook of 2012, even though the year is young.
A Vook is a hybrid between a digital book, a movie and online interfaces. Vook's processing power lets me create rich media reading experiences in one pass. A lot of publishing houses (more than 30 the last time I checked) have forged relationships with Vook and hundreds of multimedia selections cover selections across fiction and non-fiction.
A Vook behaves like an ebook. That means you can enlarge text, scroll around content, flip pages, insert bookmarks and skip to different chapters. I can get a Vook for my iPad, for my Kindle, to read while online, or to download and read on my laptop. This is a big deal for multimedia creatives because it means being able to resuse many rich media objects by crafting them inside a Vook. My daughter likes seeing Vooks in full colour. They are more engaging than the black and white Kindle screen.
Vooks are set up to share thoughts from the content on the pages to your friends on Facebook and Twitter. Windows to those social networks will open while the Vook keeps the main screen available for reading. Select an icon on the top right of the page an embedded Vook videos will play in full screen mode. Or click a different icon to minimize the video window and see more text on the page. You can run video alongside the text content on a Vook page.
When done correctly, the videos within the text help highlight the points made in the Vook. I've seen presentations from authors, interviews with guest speakers and straightforward pitches.
But vidoes in Vooks can look rewarmed and out of place. I often think information shared via video could be delivered more elegantly via audio. I haven't used Vooks for tutorials but that's where I see their big strength.
I plan to spend a lot of my summer creating Vooks for several modules in the creative multimedia curriculum taught at the Limerick Institute of Technology. I will also show how to plan a Vook during a workshop in the DIT E-learning Summer School during the month of June.
Electronic Design Automation -- Vook Review: An Enhanced Multimedia Experience, 2009.
Dorothy D -- Vook Review: Crush It by Gary Vaynerchuk–As Good as an Audio Book?, January 21, 2010.
Brian Brushwood's Vook Awarded "Best Overall eBook" in a Vook.com competition, February 14, 2012. Scam School 1 Out Now!
