Post from http://www.danieluk.net
It’s about as close as the book world ever gets to hosting a sports event: a hackathon!
Press release follows:
SAN FRANCISCO: The first ever CODEX Hackathon will take place June 26-28, 2015 in San Francisco during the American Library Association conference to innovate on the future of reading, publishing, libraries and literary technology.
Sponsoring and partnering organizations include HarperCollins, the New York Public Library, Goodreads, Dropbox, Macmillan, Wattpad, The Knight Foundation GitHub, Mailchimp, Stanford d.school, Publishers Weekly, Gitbook, Shelfie, Bowker, Ingram Content among many others. (A full list of sponsors and partners can be found at codexhackathon.com)
Participants — about 100 selected through an online application process powered by Submittable — are coming from all across the United States, in addition to Mexico, Great Britain, and France. They represent a mix of publishing and tech talent — including employees of the Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington DC, Google, the One Story literary journal, Macmillan, IDEO, The New Yorker, Twitter, and Chronicle Books, as well as students from MIT and Stanford.
The talent base includes iOS engineers, writers, editors, designers, community organizers, and retailers. Well over $ 10,000 in stipends, raised from sponsors, is being distributed to help defray travel costs.
The theme of the first CODEX hackathon is “connecting” — connecting around books, connecting around reading, connecting readers and authors, connecting libraries with books.
One of the projects in development was inspired by an April Fools Joke by Goodreads, KINDLR, a dating app around books. Other projects include Macmillan’s internal Bookmaker tool set, which the publishing company is trying to open source and make available more general use; Harvard Book Store’s book club infrastructure, and Project Gitenberg, a version-controlled repository of over 40,000 public domain books.
Other sponsors are issuing prompts to stimulate ideas in areas they are tackling. HarperCollins is asking participants, “How can we drive more engagement with our author’s books – how can readers easily respond, share (both digital text and digital audio) and augment something meaningful they have read or listened to?” Little Brown, a division of Hachette Book Group, is asking, “How can we help readers discover new authors based on ones they already like.”
The CODEX Hackathon schedule includes:
- An opening reception at GitHub headquarters in the Soma neighborhood of San Francisco featuring a Recovering the Classics pop-up gallery and the musician Daniel Park.
- The hackathon Saturday-Sunday at Code for America in Soma.
New tools will be released or made available for participants include:
- Wattpad’s new beta API, which has not been officially released, but allows for writing to Wattpad. (Contact: Matthew Chan <matthew@wattpad.com>)
- Shelfie’s Optical Character Recognition API where a client can upload an image of a shelfie and get back a list of ISBNs of the books detected in the shelfie. (Contact: Marius Muja <marius.muja@bitlit.com>)
- Zola’s book recommendation engine (Contact: Matt Goldfarb <matt.goldfarb@zolabooks.com>)
- Pinterest’s new beta API, which requires approval to get access.
- Cloudstitch.io, a Y Combinator company which allows control of a website with the ease of a spreadsheet.
In addition, Mailchimp, Dropbox, and Readium engineers will be on hand to help with their tools. (A more complete list of tools is available online).
Among the data to be made available for teams: a selected group of Publishers Weekly starred reviews and metadata; novellas from Nouvella, an independent publisher dedicated to the novella; short stories from Plympton’s DailyLit, four of which were noted in the Best American Short Stories of 2014; covers from the Recovering the Classics project.
A Kickstarter publishing representative will also give a presentation about successful publishing projects on the crowdfunding platform.
Prizes will include literary merchandise from Out of Print and Litographs, as well as bestselling titles from sponsors.
Another CODEX Hackathon is planned for New York City.
CODEX was organized by Plympton, a San Francisco literary studio which innovates around digital publishing. Its projects and collaborations have included Recovering the Classics book design project with the NYPL and the White House; the Twitter Fiction Festival; the Rooster mobile reading service; and the CODEX Hackathon.
The post Going to ALA? Get Ready for the CODEX Hackathon appeared first on Publishing Perspectives.
Publishing Perspectives | RSS Feed
Going to ALA? Get Ready for the CODEX Hackathon http://www.danieluk.net/news/going-to-ala-get-ready-for-the-codex-hackathon/ #Books, #Content, #DigitalPublishing, #Publishing, #Technology
No comments:
Post a Comment