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Reinventing audio, re-mixing children's books, the challenge of content curation, and mining metadata will form the core of the challenges put in front of hackers at the FutureBook Hack, the UK's first industry-wide book publishing hack.
Content will be provided by publishing partners Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Pan Macmillan, Simon & Schuster, Faber, and Nielsen with a £5,000 prize to be shared among the winning team. So far more than 100 hackers have registered on FutureBookHack to participate, with 30% of those female.
The hack, produced by Blackwell's digital director Matthew Cashmore, and run by The Bookseller, takes place over 30 hours beginning at 10.00am Saturday 14th June at University College London. Other prizes on offer to participating teams include Firefox OS devices, the Geeksphone Keon and the Geeksphone Peak, and a full suite of Touch Press apps. More prizes will be announced on the day.
The hack will begin with a range of talks, including a keynote from Cashmore, who has run the influential Over the Air hack at Bletchley Park for a number of years. Other talks include Daniel Appelquist, Open Web Advocate at Telefonica, and Jon Rogers, Professor of Creative Technology at the University of Dundee.
The event will also see publishers, authors, and digital mentors, mix with the developer community in order to spark and play with ideas aimed at the book world as it continues to re-imagine its digital future. Food and entertainment will be provided free of charge including education sessions, films, reading, and yoga. Drinks have been provided by event sponsor Virtusales.
Alice Ryan, The Bookseller's conference and communities manager, said: "We can’t get over the response to our first Futurebook hack. We have hackers coming from across the country and from different areas of expertise to brainstorm with the brightest minds in publishing. Everybody who is coming has one thing in common- they love and believe in books. It’s set to be a brilliant event and to throw up some fantastic possibilities about what the future of publishing, reading and the book could look like "
To pre-register for the hack, visit the FutureBook Hack site.