iPad observation #9: I went digging through the heap of festering garbage that is the Vook and came home with an education.

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Vain though it may be, tonight I looked in on my own past posts on the Vook. The writing was better than I remembered it, just exactly my kind of fun with words, but I do think I have been overly… forgiving… of this sleazy little… not vampire, even writ small… this skeezy little mosquito of a wannabe undead bloodsucker left over from the last century.

I am told that my swats at that mosquito incite much trashing and weeping amongst the very-publicly-aggrieved in the twitset — expressing, it would seem, the vitally-important necessity of brazenly butt-bussing besieged billionaires — but the plain truth is that I have not derided and denounced the Vook with anything like the rigor and vigor that this kind of epistemological emergency demands. One more way in which I feel myself blessed to have had the iPad to think about, this past week, is that thinking about the iPad and what it can and will do illustrate pellucidly what the Vook can’t and won’t do.

What the Vook actually does is lame and stupid. And while everything it does is fundamentally unnecessary, nevertheless, everything it does is very simple to design and to program. I do not know of anything the Vook does — neither the I-think-discontinued dedicated device nor the inevitable-fallback iPhone apps nor the “simulated” scenes of same found on the Vook.tv web site — that cannot be done on an ordinary web site. Easily. By anyone. With no programming or Javascript, and serving only as the broker in the embedded Flash video client/server transactions. In other words, if you can manage your own WordPress site, you can make “video books” that suck just as perfectly as a genuine Vook.

The sublime truth is, you can undoubtedly make much better Vooks than Brad Inman can, not alone because, if you have resolved to make the effort to Vook what you know, you’re going to make the effort to make your Vook — your gnuVook? — riveting and unassailable. That just by itself is tremendously exciting to me.

Now imagine every passion-driven web site out there re-envisioned as an iPad app. Not just text and video, but taking full advantage of the hardware — audio, video, text, touch, motion, all integrated with everything else on the web. How about semantically integrated, with the app and the iPad working together at every launch of the app to maintain the best and most useful outbound links. This will all start to happen now. Slowly and clumsily at first, but we are on the verge of iPad authoring tools that are to the iPad what HyperCard always wanted to be to the original Macintosh. This is so cool I could freeze solid right now!

Meanwhile, Brad Inman (along with every vendor of crap products) thinks you’re an idiot. He doesn’t think he needs to get as close as he can come to doing a perfect job. He doesn’t think he even needs to do a proficient job. He studied under the world’s great carney barkers, from P.T. Barnum to Andy Warhol, and he is convinced to the core that pigs — that would be you, the consumer — will eat anything. Worse, that pigs will beg and plead for the opportunity to waste their hard-earned money on reeking, festering, nauseating garbage.

Yes. I agree. I am making a mountain out of a molehill. But it happens that we all of us have until lately been stranded on a vast, barren mountain composed utterly and entirely of uninterrupted molehills. The Vook is near to hand — and dear to my mind in its almost-perfect upfucktitude — so I think it does us well to examine the underlying epistemology and psychology of the business model. But that underlying epistemologically-psychotic psychology is everywhere. Or was until lately, and, we may hope that its waning waxes on forever. There will always be con-men and the sly lazy liars who are their natural prey. But the outrageous failure of the Vook is something we all can take pride in. At least we are not complete suckers!

Even so, the things I have written about the Vook, while not nearly harsh enough, seem to me to be ripe with pith — rich in truth and portentous in their marketing insights. I found — if I might be indulged in my outsized, awesome humility — that revisiting them repaid my effort. I’m not the Vookish type, but I’m thinking that if you read, think about and quarrel with the marketing arguments I am making, at the very least you will come away with a better understanding of what I think marketing is and should be — even if you disagree with everything I’m saying.

But: Even then: When Brad Inman takes to the pages of the New York Times to insult my intelligence and yours and everyone’s with a bucket full of unconcealed, uncongealed carney crap straight out of Machiavelli (the Vook, not a real book) — kissing his boo-boos and kissing his ass are the very last things on my mind. And while swatting at mosquitos is not itself a wealth-producing action, it is the preferable stop-loss. It’s disgusting to squash a cockroach — or a scorpion — but much more disgusting to make yourself its slave, its minion, its underling, its toady — its stooge. And it must be true that Brad Inman has no friends if I am the only person on this earth who told him that his swan-song brain-fart is useless and idiotic and cravenly cynical — irrelevantly redundant and fundamentally corrupt.

But even then: My take is that to have read me on the Vook and the iPad is really to have read something — this being the most-perfectly Roman sentence I have devised in my brief career as a Latinist. To write is to think, to read is to rethink, and to engage a thoughtful mind — in silence and solitude — when that mind has the time, the inclination and the courage to think the unthought — the unthinkable! — this is but the shadow of what human communication can be and will be as we grow into our fundamental, unavoidable, inescapable, gorgeous and glorious solitary self-responsibility. The lazy liar needs the con-man and the sucker needs the carney barker. But we stand on the threshold of the world of man — of true humanity — and we each of us need nothing but the human mind — each one invisible to all the others — and the vast riches we can unearth by using the mind.

So: Indulge my indulgence, if you choose. Or don’t. But my final thought is this one: This essay is proof of its argument: I may be very far from being wise, but I am wiser for having thought this through — by having written about it. Your mind is your own business, but my mind, at least, is improved.

Try doing that with a Vook.

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