Amazon VideoBooks, an AI-Powered Reading Concept

The idea

Books keep getting turned into movies that leave out half the story. Amazon VideoBooks asked a different question: what if the book itself came with visuals and narration, so you could watch and read in one place? It was a team concept built for Amazon's ecosystem, sitting between Kindle, Audible and Prime Video, aimed at Millennial and Gen Z readers who already live on streaming.

My role

I owned the demo. I wrote a short story sequence for the prototype and planned how each scene would unfold, including the timing, the transitions and the emotional arc of a chapter. Then I built it.

How I built it

I generated the scenes and characters in Midjourney, keeping each image true to the story's tone. I turned those stills into motion in Runway, adding transitions and pacing so it played like a short film instead of a slideshow. I started with Murf AI for the narration, and where it didn't carry the emotion of a scene, I recorded those parts in my own voice.

The bigger picture

I also mapped how VideoBooks could plug into Amazon's ecosystem: voice control through Alexa, bonus content on Kindle, and cross-promotion on Prime Video. Our team built the go-to-market plan around it, with personas, positioning against ebooks and audiobooks, and launch campaigns for TikTok, Instagram and search.

What I learned

AI got us to a working demo fast, but the parts that made it feel like a story, the pacing, the voice, and where each scene cuts, still took human judgment. That's where most of my time went, and it's what made the demo worth watching.