[Updated 1/12/16, 10:22 a.m. See below.] For the past 20 years, the story of the publishing industry has revolved largely around the rise of e-books, tablets, and Amazon. Call it “Digital Publishing 1.0.”
But what will “Digital Publishing 2.0” look like? If the ideas born at a hackathon at the MIT Media Lab this past weekend are any indication, the future of publishing is about stronger emphasis on design, interactive experiences, the human touch, and creating connections between literature and the real world.
The Codex hackathon, an initiative run by the literary studio Plympton, brought together over 150 software programmers, designers, entrepreneurs, teachers, students, writers, librarians, publishers, and more. They formed nearly 30 teams and spent the weekend creating rough prototypes of their ideas to advance publishing, reading, and education.
The projects included educational apps and games to help children and teens engage more with books and news articles, apps for making e-books more visually appealing, and software tools to help readers connect and collaborate. Some of the ideas tackled serious topics like censorship. Others were more light-hearted, like software that allows users to replace the names of characters in books with the names of relatives and friends, and then share the revised version of the text.
The diversity of Codex participants was impressive, especially considering the lack thereof in the broader tech sector. At the hackathon, there was a healthy mix of women and men, different ethnicities, and generations ranging from teens to people in their 50s. Participants traveled from as far away as Taiwan, Germany, Israel, and the western U.S., said Codex founder Jennifer 8. Lee.
The goal of the event wasn’t necessarily to spawn ideas that could turn into successful businesses, but to form connections between people with “different skill sets” who view writing and publishing as a craft, said Lee, Plympton’s co-founder and CEO.
“By having people of different backgrounds together, you get more innovative solutions,” she said.
The first Codex hackathon was held in San Francisco last summer. The group’s organizers are considering holding more hackathons in places like Berlin and New York, Lee said.
Unlike some hackathons, Codex isn’t a contest where judges award prizes to the projects they deem best. At the end of the weekend, all of the teams got a few minutes to demonstrate what they had created, but there were no “winners” or “losers.” In lieu of cash prizes, Codex used sponsorship money to subsidize many participants’ travel and lodging expenses, Lee said. Also, all participants got free t-shirts from Out of Print and Litographs, paperbacks from Harvard Book Store, and posters from the Recovering the Classics project. [This paragraph was updated with additional details about free items for participants.]
One of Lee’s takeaways from the event was how teams devised ways for individuals to customize their books. Examples included Replace the Characters’ software allowing users to change names in the text and Rebook’s software letting users make annotations and doodles in the margins of their e-books. “There’s something really powerful in that,” Lee said.
Although much of the teams’ efforts were spent on building back-end technology that relies on natural language processing and open-source software programs, it was clear that many of them paid equal attention to aesthetics and user experience. For example, Infinite Library aims to put the plain text of the 50,000 free e-books on Project Gutenberg’s website into a more visually appealing format.
“I had a sense there’s an element of human touch coming back” to publishing technology, said Codex participant Robert Wenrich, a product developer with Bild, a German tabloid newspaper. Five years ago, the projects at a hackathon like Codex “would be just code,” Wenrich added.
Mark Watkins agreed. “Some of those projects were art,” not just a black screen with white letters, he said.
Watkins—an entrepreneur who currently leads The Hawaii Project, a book recommendation service that donates 10 percent of its revenue to literacy nonprofits—was a Codex sponsor and participant. He created software that
