Vooks, Blooks & Ooks

Various forms of electronic books, or books associated with the Internet.

In The Times, Motoko Rich revealed:

On Thursday … Simon & Schuster, the publisher of Ernest Hemingway and Stephen King, is working with a multimedia partner to release four “vooks,” which intersperse videos throughout electronic text that can be read — and viewed — online or on an iPhone or iPod Touch.

While “vook” is not new – the multimedia company working alongside Simon & Shuster is called Vook, for instance – the word may become more mainstream if such works catch on. According to Rich, other recent vookshave included crime thrillers and romance novels:

And in early September Anthony E. Zuiker, creator of the television series “CSI,” released “Level 26: Dark Origins,” a novel — published on paper, as an e-book and in an audio version — in which readers are invited to log on to a Web site to watch brief videos that flesh out the plot. …

Jude Deveraux, a popular romance author who has written 36 straightforward text novels, said she loved experimenting with “Promises,” an exclusive vook set on a 19th-century South Carolina plantation in which the integrated videos add snippets of dialogue and atmosphere.

Books serialized on blogs, and books spawned from blogs, are sometimes called blooks. The latter even have their own award, the Lulu Blooker Prize.

Famed editor Robert Giroux may be responsible for the invention of another useful book-related term: “ooks,” which New York Magazine defined as “gimmicks that [aren't] quite books.”