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I spent a good hour and a half last night with just my son and my iPad. No, we weren’t playing Brothers in Arms, or even Zombie Smash (his personal favorite at the moment, being 11 which is an age when zombie slayer looms large in his future career choices). We were reading a Vook together. Heroes for my Son, by Brad Meltzer to be exact.

As some of you may know, a Vook is a different approach to an ebook, one that includes video or multimedia segments built directly into the text. Therefore they are sort of a “Video Book”, hence a Vook. They appear on the iPad as stand alone Apps, not dependant on any ebook reader. Just run the App to open the Vook.

So last night, rather than watching any Doctor Who or playing any of the normal video games, my son got a chance to play guest reviewer as we sat down on the edge of his bed with the iPad to see what he thought of a Vook.

First, I want to focus a little bit on the form of this Vook, and then a bit on the content.

Though the name may sound like a creature that could eat you on Pandora, Vooks are actually clever little media hybrids. They are very very well suited for presenting information or stories which are episodic in nature or can benefit from having a lot of background material readily available. For example, if you have a biography of The Beatles, you can build video or music clips directly into the text at the appropriate places. If you want to watch or hear it, you click PLAY…if not, you can continue reading. The Vook makes use of the now somewhat ubiquitous “Pull and Release” method to change chapters. Pull the screen up past the end, and release it. You can also switch chapters using arrow buttons on the toolbar, or a drop down Table of Contents. Vooks are usually arranged in segments due to this method of changing chapters, each one standing alone and often able to be read in any order. Collections of short stories, poetry, essays, historical treatises, erotica (yes, I said it), self help guides, film or literary criticism…all of these would make fantastic Vooks.

It is easy to see the tremendous possibilities in the Vook format, especially when tied to a tablet device like the iPad.

I very much enjoyed my first experience with a Vook mainly because I rapidly dropped my attempt to think of it as a Book with video plug ins. A Vook is really a multimedia platform that centers around text, rather then a traditional “book”. It can gather information of all sorts, text, pictures, video and sound and merge them together in a sort of self-supporting package…a PDF on steroids. On top of that, it is charmingly non-linear and can be approached from many different angles…not just a straight forward “start at the beginning” sort of thing. A scholar’s dream. More a chocolate box than a book, especially if you are like me and enjoy really digging down into a subject while reading.

So, what did my co-reviewer have to say about reading a Vook? I will transcribe his spoken answer to the question “So, what did you think of reading a book like this?”

I think it is sort of like on Star Trek or in Avatar, like they have in the labs where they put Jake in the tank, before he ran out. It is really great that there is more to do then just read the story, and the little movies were interesting and didn’t do that buffering thing at all so I didn’t have to wait for them like in YouTube. School books would be a lot better if they were done like this and more kids would want to read them. Teachers would have to talk less which would make them happy, too. In science class they wouldn’t need to describe so much or leave things out, they could just put movies in to show you. Also stories from TV shows or movies would be great like this, if you could see little clips from the real thing. Not for like Harry Potter or things like that since they get things wrong but for other things that start out as movies and become books, not that are books that they make into movies. Are there lots of Vooks? Can I have my own iPad to read these?

As for Heroes for my Son, I thought Meltzer put together an excellent collection of figures that would make great role models for any young person. I would have liked a little more content however, since he restricted himself to only one or two anecdotes about each figure. For example, he boiled Einstein down to a little about his childhood, and the Theory of Relativity. Since this is a Vook, some links to websites or more in depth information would have been very welcome.

However, the main thing Meltzer’s vignettes did (and I am sure were intended to do) was open a conversation which was still going on this morning about personal heroes, who they were and why. Using Meltzer’s list as a jumping off point, I talked to him about some of my own heroes, some he has heard about from me a lot (Theodore Roosevelt, Josef Trumpledor) and some he hasn’t heard as much about (Quentin Crisp, Adlai Stephenson)…and I learned a little bit more about who my son considers to be his heroes. If a good book makes for good conversation, then this was definitely a good book.

Heroes for my Son is a book I would recommend to any parent looking for something to share with a child. It will open up discussions on all sorts of important issues, as well as just being some nice, short profiles of some great people. It is also a great introduction to the world of Vooks.

And no, he can’t have his own iPad.