09.05.14 | Sarah Shaffi - The Bookseller
The Bookseller is to bring together major publishers for the UK’s first publishing hackathon. FutureBook Hack, being held on 14th and 15th June, will challenge teams to come up with a solution to challenges facing the industry in just 36 hours.
Hackathons have been used as brainstorming platforms to find solutions to problems facing the media, music, health and even emergency sectors, but never has something like this been undertaken on such a scale in the publishing sector in the UK.
Pan Macmillan, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Penguin Random House and Faber & Faber are the founding partners of the hack, which is being run in collaboration with William Morris Endeavor (WME) with support from the Centre for Publishing at the Department of Information Studies, University College London, Blackwell’s and Midas PR. The initiative for the hackathon came from WME’s Simon Trewin, who proposed the idea at the 2013 FutureBook Conference.
He told The Bookseller that publishing needed to “wake up to the fact that it is a scarier environment”, adding that it needed to stop being an “inbred community”. He said: “We need to get out there and make ourselves vulnerable and find people who can help us get to where the market is going. What we need to do is find people who come from other worlds and are coming to publishing like they’re strangers walking into a strange land and have something to offer us. A hackathon offers [publishing] a fresh perspective.”
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