Vook teams with Deepak Chopra, adds 19 titles for iPad

(AFP PHOTO/ Yuri CORTEZ)

Physician and author Deepak Chopra is set to publish two "vooks" as part of a new partnership between Vook and Trident Media, according to a press release sent on April 2. Chopra's book Buddha: A Story of Enlightenment, as well as a vook featuring members of the Chopra Foundation's 2010 Sages and Scientists Symposium, will join other Vook applications available for both iPhone and iPad.

A vook is a mixed-media form that blends video, text, images, and social streams into a single, integrated experience. Vooks can be streamed to the browser-based Vook Reader or downloaded as a unique mobile application. Another high-profile writer to have collaborated with Vook is Ann Rice, whose vook of The Master of Rampling Gate, released March 3, includes seven videos about vampires, the black plague, the gothic style, and Anne Rice herself.

Chopra's Buddha: A Story of Enlightenment, published in 2008, is a novel about the life of prince Siddhartha and how he became the Buddha. The vook, according to Chopra, will be a "multi-media adventure story on enlightenment." In the second vook, doctors, philosophers, thinkers, and theologians from the Sages and Scientists Symposium will discuss ways that science and religion can work together to create a better world.

"We are entering a new era of multimedia expression that brings information and knowledge into the human nervous system through a variety of sensory inputs," says Chopra. "For the last 25 years, I have written about consciousness and the ramifications of understanding our spirit through the window of science. Today I believe this is possible because of the new technologies."

Called "the poet-prophet of alternative medicine" by Time Magazine, Deepak Chopra is the author of more than 55 books, most of them non-fiction, that have been translated into more than 35 languages worldwide.

In other Vook news, on April 1 the company launched 19 of its titles as iPad applications, all now available in Apple's App Store. Those include The Sherlock Holmes Experience, Seth Godin's Unleashing the SUPER Ideavirus, and Anne Rice's title, which goes for $4.99 as an iPhone app and $5.99 for iPad.

http://www.vook.com