HomeGain founder Brad Inman has quietly launched a new startup that he hopes will revolutionize reading books online. The new venture, called Vook, is a platform for e-books that combines text, video and social networking.

There’s not much information to report yet about Inman’s company – a profile in today’s New York Times didn’t reveal much – but Sara Nelson, the former editor of Publisher’s Weekly, has seen the Vook prototype and says that it puts video inside a book.

That’s not surprising given Inman’s most recent startup, Turn Here, a network of videographers who film, among other subjects, author videos for publishers.

E-books have gained a boost in the last year with Amazon’s Kindle and a slew of other devices including smart phones like Apple’s iPhone. Inman’s Vook aims to work across different mobile platforms.

Books with video might seem to older readers to be pandering to the short attention span younger generation, but Inman says he doesn’t feel “we are compromising the written word. People will to continue to read, just in new ways. Books are finally coming online but they are very one-dimensional. I think we can experiment and do this better.”

Vook and other e-book platforms suggest new directions for newspapers and magazines online. If a book can have video and social networking built in, all the more so for media publishers who already include that information on their sites. Vook aside, media integration is a trend we’ve long advocated for revitalizing the struggling publishing industry.

Vook is in beta (you can request an invite). The company just set up a Twitter presence following the Times’ article’s publication.