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Don’t vook now, but Brad Inman has invented The Undead Pool

By: Greg Swann, Phoenix Real Estate, Post Archive, RSS Feed
Posted: Monday, April 6th, 2009, 8:17 am MST
Category: Casual Friday, Marketing, Technology

The New York Times:

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:

The chokepoint is dead.

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.

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Brad Inman: “Would someone be kind enough to sell me some fur? I know mammals are warm-blooded, but perception is reality, right? Oh, what the hell! The way things are going, I’d settle for some feathers!”

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

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