Full videos of the talks from Tech Forum and ebookcraft are now available, but if you're a busy professional on the go and don't have time to sit down and watch them, we've also compiled some of the highlights from Tech Forum into handy podcast form so you can take the insights and innovation on the go with you.
Contained in these action-packed 30 minutes are kernels of knowledge on how millennials read and buy books, how and why the industry should work to include more diverse voices, five recommendations for improving your book metadata in today's complex marketplace, and lessons for encouraging grassroots innovation at a legacy publisher.
(Scroll down for a transcript of the conversation.)
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Transcript
Krista Mitchell: Last month, we hosted our 10th annual Tech Forum Conference, which is basically a day-long meeting of the minds that brings together members of Canada's book industry to discuss all the major issues affecting the publishing and selling of books in today's trade market. We also have these amazingly nerdy cookies, about 1,000 slides about cats, and it's basically the nerdiest most fun time ever. If you weren't able to attend or if you missed some of the talks, we're happy to share that you can now watch full video recordings online. Just head over to booknetcanada.ca/tech-forum, and you can also find that URL in the podcast description and look for the link. You'll also be able to find videos for the talks from ebookcraft, our conference within a conference all about ebooks and digital publishing. To give you a sense of the day's biggest talks, we've compiled a Tech Forum highlight reel for this month's podcast.
On this episode, we have consumer research on how millennials buy and read books, and discussion on the need and opportunities for diversity and publishing, five recommendations for managing metadata and a complex marketplace, and inspiration for encouraging grassroots innovation at a legacy publisher.
To kick things off, here's Noah Genner, the President and CEO of BookNet Canada, sharing some of the findings from our latest survey of Canadian book consumers with a focus on the habits and preferences of the millennial demographic. If you hear him mentioned Mary Beth here and there, he's referring to an earlier presentation from Mary Beth Barbour, a Senior Vice President at Ipsos, who presented on their research about millennials as consumers of media in general. And that video, of course, is also available if you want to hear what she had to say. But first, here's Noah.
Noah Genner: One of the interesting things that we've seen over the last year or so, and maybe counterintuitive on some of the data we've already seen is that millennials are actually reading more books than the other cohorts combined. So, 86% of our millennial respondents last year said they read a book. We're only 81% of the other cohorts, and that's all the other cohorts gonna match together. Not only did they say that they read more, 40% said they were gonna increase...the reading year-over-year had increased, 40% stayed the same at only 20% said it declined. That's quite a bit higher at 40% increase is quite a bit higher than all the other cohorts combined. So, they're reading. They're reading more. This number, this 86%, we do our millennials is 18% to 34%. The pew study does a little bit different, but the numbers follow the same pattern in the U.S. The millennial cohort in the U.S. is actually reading more. Which leaves their activities would you say are your top two choices for spending your free time? Remember, this is reading. So, reading ranks number five here. I'm not sure if we should be concerned about that or not. We don't have enough year-over-year surveys to see this number sliding.
So, this is reading books by the way. And we don't have enough year-over-year numbers to see if this is sliding or not. But it is a bit of a concern because the other cohorts that comes in at number three. So, reading is down below playing video games, watching TV, spending time with family, and browsing the internet. So, this is what type of device do you own? Fifty-five percent of our respondents say they own a tablet, 19% said they owned an e-reader, 93% on a smartphone. Smartphone penetration in Canada is getting pretty close to 100%. Most millennials are not planning on buying a device in the next year. Okay. That's changed year-over-year. We saw in previous years, I think the tablet thing was really saying that they're gonna buy another device in the next year. But now they're saying they're not going to. If they are going to buy a new device, they're going to buy a smartphone. That's what they're telling us. They are not going to buy any e-reader unfortunately.
What format did you read? So, 89% read print books last year, or read a print book last year, 28% listen to an audiobook. And I'm gonna explore these a little bit more. Fifty-four percent said they read an ebook. Last year millennials read more ebooks and listen to more audiobooks, but read the same amount of print books as the other cohorts. So, the others, I didn't put them up here. The others were exactly the same at 89% for print, ebooks were at 50%, and audio was at 24%. We think that millennials may be more format agnostic. So, most millennials will move between devices too. That's another question we asked. So, they'll actually read sometimes on the smartphone, sometimes on a tablet, sometimes on their laptop, and they'll actually within the same book move between devices, like what Mary Beth was saying as well. But you'll see here it's a little bit all over the place, but the bar I'd like to pick out and I'm gonna come back to again a couple of times is the smartphone bar, which is the third one down.
So, almost double the amount of people, millennials reader will say that they're gonna primarily read on their smartphones, 20%. That's big, and that's changing all the time. And we could talk about the devices having bigger screens and all those things. So you're talking, this is where I wanna spend most the time. I wanna talk about book buyers. So, this is specifically from our book buyer study. So we asked throughout 2015, so it's pretty recent data, we asked approximately 1800 English-speaking Canadians, 500 millennials about the books they bought. And it turns out that we have pretty detailed data on about 5,000 purchases. So, this is a pretty robust data set. So, before I go into it, I'll just kind of do what our panel looks like in the breakdown on demographics. So, our panel tends to, for millennials tends to wait even more female, across both the other cohorts and millennials they tend to live in Central Canada, that's just our population breakdown. Millennials are much more likely to be in urban population centers. They're more educated as Mary Beth touched on. They have a full-time job as opposed to being retired. They're single. And the average age where our millennials and our panel is 27 years old, just about right in the middle, almost right in the middle, and the other cohorts comes out to about 56.
So, not only do millennials read more, they buy more. So, when are buying panel, the blue bar is millennials, they buy 2.8 books in a month, whereas the other cohorts combined by 2.6 books per month. Millennials bought 7% of all of the books that we registered a sale of last year and that goes similar to their population density. Most of the purchasing for millennials... Sorry, the ebooks. Most of the purchasing for eBooks by millennials is done in-app. Okay. Then they go the free sources, not necessarily the library, they purchase through the browser, they purchase on an e-reader, they go to the library, and they go to the subscription. So, we don't ask in our panel, did you hire a book? No one's gonna answer that question truthfully anyway, but actually be surprised by an anonymous survey, which you can get people to do, but that free source is not library. The second bar is interesting. Is that open content or is that stuff they're getting off torrent sites? We don't really know, but the number is quite high. So, maybe it's something we'll watch year-over-year and see what they're doing. So, but that inept number is quite high 30% for ebooks.
And I think that Kobo and Amazon could probably backup some of that number. When we ask them which platforms they use to do their reading and buying on, 46% say they use Amazon Kindle, 30% say they use iBooks, 26% say they use Kobo, followed by OverDrive for reading and purchasing. So, I'm gonna just jump back to this audiobook number because I think it's worth exploring a little bit. What we've heard because we've done some audiobooks surveying, too, what we've heard is that, you know, audiobooks are kind of going through a resurgence a year-over-year growth, and the audiobook sales in the U.S., and the UK, and Canada is huge. It's kind of those press releases used to see from AAP where they were saying, ebooks are growing 2,500% month-over-month, like we're just not seeing those anymore.
So, now they've decided to do with audiobooks, right? When the percentage is almost zero, you get 1,000% increase pretty quickly, right? So, but we are seeing a lot of growth, right? So, audio is a growing segment. So, something we should pay attention to. I've done lots of presentations on this. It just came in my newsfeed, Audible reported yesterday selling a million Harry Potter audiobooks in four months. Now that's a drop in the bucket when you compare it to the billion of print versions, but that's just in four months, and they're charging a premium price, and they sold a million of them, and a lot of those went to millennials, I think.
So, 28% of millennials said they bought or listened to an audiobook in the last 12 months, 18% of those people do it only in digital. So, it's really an important segment. And why do we think that it's an important segment, it goes to some of the stuff Mary Beth was talking about. Millennials are busy. They're doing lots of things at once and audiobooks really lend themselves to that. When you talk to people who listen to audiobooks, it's very rarely that they're just sitting down listening to audiobooks, they're commuting, they're on transit, they're walking their dog, they're cleaning the house, they're doing multiple, multiple things. So, this is a really interesting thing that we need to watch. I know there's a lot of initiatives that are taking advantage of it, but it's quite important. So, I sliced and diced it. One other thing about audiobooks. This probably doesn't come as a big surprise. Millennials almost spent almost 100%, is not 100%, but very high percentage-wise listen on their phones to audiobooks. All the other cohorts tend to listen on their tablets. So phones, very again, very popular.
We're gonna jump over the subjects now. So, millennials are more likely to buy these subjects, and they buy more fantasy, romance, and science fiction in the fiction categories. They buy more education, business, and science in the nonfiction. Millennials buy more genre fiction than a higher percentage than anyone else. Where do they shop? Touch very much on Mary Beth stuff, 40.6% of all of our purchases in our panel last year were made online across all formats. That's huge. That's almost 50% of all books being bought or being bought online. So, while we're pretty consistent online across everywhere, where we see a little bit of a difference is that others tend to shop in nontraditional bookstores. And I'm gonna talk a little bit about that behavior in a second. Whereas, maybe contrary to what we'd expect millennials are bookstore shoppers that tend to go to bookstores a little bit more than the rest of the population. So, this is similar in other territories as well. So, I'm gonna explore these in a little bit more detail as well. So, we also ask where did you buy it? Amazon is number one for millennials 20% of purchases are made at Amazon. Indigo stores is number one for non-millennials. Amazon number two. Generally, all online channels are more important outlets for millennials with the exception of Kobo was trends towards an older demographic.
So looking at that online shopping, we also ask sentiment questions or we ask why did you shop at this particular store? Most of the answers we get from millennials are online related, whether they shopped at online store or not, they kind of really talk about delivery, they want fast delivery of product, they don't wanna wait for it, they wanna get it really quickly. They really liked the ability to sample or look inside. Those are really important kind of decisions to buy at a particular store to millennials. When we look at the other cohorts, most of the kinds of sentiments we get about why they shop places are physically related. So, it's that the store has a good selection. And this may be the key one to that shopping not at bookstores. They were shopping there for something else anyway and decided to pick up a book.
So, in summary, because that was a lot of graphs, they will be available after, millennials are still reading and buying books, but they're very price-conscious and are focused on the value quality of book. They will pay more if they see value. They've told us that. Online as a discovery and shopping channel are hugely important, but millennials still go to stores. Peer reviews recommendations are really important whether they be online or in person. Audio has a growing format for all cohorts, but even more so for millennials. Millennials seem to be format-agnostic. Mobile is still important and growing.
Krista: Next up, we have Kaya Thomas, the developer behind the We Read Too app, which showcases hundreds of children's and young adult fiction books written by and for people of colour. She'll be talking about the challenges facing the book industry when it comes to inclusion, and how it can benefit and serve readers better by embracing diverse voices.
Kaya: So the Cooperative Children's Book Center at the University of Wisconsin Madison has been collecting data on children's books written by Black, Native American, Asian, and Latino authors, and books that feature characters of those same backgrounds for well over 10 years. The most recent data in 2015 shows that less than 11% of those children's books were written by people of colour, and less than 15% were written about people of colour. This means that millions of children and teens of colour have few options when it comes to finding books that are written by someone of their same background, or a book that features characters that look like them. So, what does this mean for kids of colour? I grabbed this quote from educator Amy Rothschild, which exemplifies her experience as a teacher.
She looked for books for students that came from underrepresented backgrounds and was challenged and often resigned to collecting the same books over and over. People of colour makeup over 30% and 19% of the American and Canadian populations respectively, in the United States over 50% of children under one years old were non-white as of July 2011, and the population of people of colour in Canada is projected to grow to over 30% in less than 20 years. This is a problem not only faced by young students of colour, but also faced by educators, librarians, community members, and anyone who wants to enrich the lives of children and teens through literature. So, fast forward. A year after I graduated high school, I discovered computer science. I started taking computer science in the middle of my first year at Dartmouth College, and I fell in love with it, and almost the same way that I fell in love with books all those years before. While books allowed me to discover new worlds, coding showed me how to create new things and connect worlds to the things that I could create.
So, in the summer of 2014, with my newfound coding skills, I decided to create a resource that I had imagined back in my high school time. I named it We Read Too, because I wanted the world to know that young people of colour love to read just as much as other kids and teens, and that we should have the opportunity to know what books are out there for us, and easily access them. The directory inside of We Read Too is easily searchable. So, you can search for any titles or authors that you're in particularly looking for. Then you can view the description of the book, as well as share the book through email, text, social media, etc. You can also go directly to the books Amazon page from the app. And an important feature that I put in the app is the suggestions feature. And I created this suggestions feature because I knew that manually searching for these books myself wouldn't be sustainable over time.
And so, I created the suggestions feature so that users can tell me books that they believe should be in the directory. In the past year and a half, I've gotten over 800 suggestions of books that users want in We Read Too. I've gone through those suggestions with another student, and we've been able to double We Read Too's directory in the past year and a half. But we still have to manually go through to ensure that the books that are being suggested to us are also written by the same people who the characters are the background of the characters they're coming from. And I wanna really ensure that you understand that We Read Too isn't only for children of colour to have access to these books. I believe that is an important for all young people to read books with characters who are both similar to themselves and different, so that they have the opportunity to be exposed to other cultures. But, so often, young children of colour are only subjected to reading books where the characters are not like them. Everyone should have the opportunity to read literature that they can relate to culturally and where they feel represented.
My work with We Read Too is only a small part of the picture when it comes to inclusion in the book industry. The following are some of my calls to action for the publishing industry related to inclusion. First, books written by people of colour should be easier to find. Aside from a few articles here and there that come out with 10 books written by Black, Latino, Asian, Native American authors, etc., there should be a way for those who want to aggregate all the books to do so.
For example, if there are metadata tags that can show the ethnicity of the author or the ethnicity of the characters in the book that will make it easier to aggregate titles in relation to the background of the authors and characters. Although tagging these books will not be easy feat, it will create space for more apps and resources like We Read Too to allow those who need and want to find these books to easily access them.
Secondly, just like a lot of other industries, people of colour do not have much representation in the publishing industry. According to data collected by Lee & Low Books, the publishing industry overall is 79% White, and on the executive level, that percentage raises to 86% White. This means that there are not a lot of people of colour making the decisions on who gets published and why. If ethnic authors are looking to get published, they might not even know where to start or who to reach out to. There needs to be an expansion of the publishing network, so that people from underrepresented backgrounds can have support and know who to go to in order to try to get their work published. There also needs to be an effort to diversifying hiring of those who are making decisions in the publishing industry. Both steps are necessary in order to attract and provide opportunity for different types of authors to create work for audience that may not be a part of the mainstream.
Lastly, for the books that have been published by authors of colour, there needs to be more efforts to market these books more heavily, so that they have the opportunity to grow their audience. Why don't we see more books written by ethnic authors on the front page of bookseller sites or in popular bookstores? There has to be more support for these authors, so they have the same opportunity to grow and reach a wider range of readers.
Krista: Following Kaya's call for better metadata to support the discovery of diverse authors and characters, here are five recommendations for improving book data from Joshua Tallent, an ebook production expert, industry activist, and Director of Outreach and Education at Firebrand Technologies.
Joshua: Let me boil all of this down to you with some recommendations that I hope will alleviate some of your fear and help you make your efforts more successful.
First and foremost, automation is your friend. There is no reason for you to be managing your metadata in Excel. I'm not gonna ask for a show of hands, but I'm hoping that no one in this room manages their book metadata in Excel, and hands those files between departments, please don't do that, or even some, you know, hack together Homebrew Access database or something else. It's just not necessary. Find a professional tool. There are lots of tools out there that will help you manage your metadata and automate the process of creating all that ONIX, slicing and dicing your data, sending it out where it needs to go, and making sure that it's done correctly. It doesn't happen by magic. It just happens by persistence and coding. So, you need automation to grow. If you wanna increase your sales, if you wanna change where you sell your books, if you wanna increase the markets that you can sell in, you have to have automation. So, adopt automation now.
Second of all, send more data. More information is better. Retailers need more information. And know lots of them don't actually use all the metadata that you're going to send to them. But the more metadata that you as a publisher send to a retailer, the more likely they are to use that data. If all the publishers sent every single retailer all of the information they could possibly use, then retailers would kind of be forced to say, "Hey, this is good data. We should use this. We'll get more sales." So, take advantage of the fact that you have the data and send it even though they're not using it. Chicken or the egg? Who should blink first? Who cares. Scrambled or rotisserie? It's all the same thing. It sounds like dinner to me.
Number three, quality, quality, quality. This is probably the one thing that if you've ever heard me speak, I probably say this more than any other word in any presentation, quality. It's extremely important. There's no reason you should not be sending out high-quality metadata. Think carefully about your book descriptions. Be proactive about writing copy that works for all of your target markets. Work with your editors. Work with people overseas and markets that you are trying to get into. Find out what the cultural norms are in that market and write your metadata, your descriptions to those cultural norms. Don't name things that are useless to those cultures. Make sure that you understand not to use that word because that word is not very nice, or whatever, right? And proof everything before you send it. Make sure that you've proof it in your system, and then go proof it again when it shows up on the retailer websites. If you see an issue like you saw on the Indigo with the italics being stripped down, go back and look at your metadata. What can you do if you can do anything to fix that? If you can't, call up the retailer and say, "Hey, hello, it's broken, please fix." File bug reports.
Number four, targets are for hitting not for ignoring. Your target markets need to be targeted. Watch out for the language that's only understandable in one of your markets, eh. Sorry, it's my only Canadian joke in the entire thing. But you got to watch for it, right? Target your markets. Don't just ignore the markets and say, "All of our data goes out to everybody, who cares?"
And number five, your metadata is evergreen. Don't leave your backlist to rot. Make a concerted and scheduled effort to update your metadata on a regular basis to take advantage of new ideas of cultural shifts, of recent news, and information to generate more interest for your books. I would recommend that you set up some sort of reminder in Google Calendar or whatever you use to go back on a regular basis and look at books that have been published in the last six months. What's happened since then? What's happened in the last year? That book that's been sitting in the backlist for a year or two may actually need an update to its metadata. And if you go back on a regular basis, and look at that, I know it's more work, but the sales that come from that are beneficial, as we saw from "Galveston," you can make more sales when you keep up to date with your metadata.
Krista: If you're now jazzed about improving workflows and processes at your office, but you could use some advice on actually going about that. We've got something for that, too. Next up, we have an excerpt from a panel on encouraging grassroots innovation at a legacy publisher, which was moderated by Teresa Elsey, the Digital Managing Editor in the Trade Division at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, where she directs a group that produces and updates more than a thousand ebooks a year. Here she is providing three examples of innovation in her work and the lessons learned.
Teresa: So I was asked to show you just a handful of innovations that we've done in my group at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Just to give you some concrete examples to start with, where the examples are not really the important part, but some of the lessons learned and some of the ideas that I hope can grow for you out of some of the stuff we've done.
So, my first is what we call Amazon rework hour, and this is a very simple one. You can laugh at me later for coming to an innovation conference to tell you about Google Spreadsheets, but I'm just throwing this in there to underscore that anyone can innovate playing. And for some of you this document may look familiar. This is the Amazon rework list. It's a list of ebook titles that Amazon has determined may contain errors and that they want us to fix and resubmit. And for most of my time at Houghton Mifflin, we had about 200 titles on this list. And it's my group's responsibility to deal with this list, but it's always a little less urgent than doing the day-to-day work. And the work itself to get titles off this list is pretty tedious and annoying. So, every week I would email this Spreadsheet to my team and I would talk to them about how it's really important to get titles off this list. A relationship to Amazon depends on getting these titles off. And I'd ask them to chip away as they had time. And essentially, we made no progress on it. Same number of titles stayed on this list every single week.
So, about a year ago, I instituted what we call Amazon rework hour, where I invited my group to a weekly hour-long meeting. And the meeting is that we just all sit at our desks and work on titles from the rework list. And I copied the Amazon Spreadsheet to a Google Doc, which let us work on it collaboratively and highlight the titles we were working on and cross them off as we finished them. And I invited everyone to a group chat. So, we complain about how it was super annoying to work on this list, but also ask each other questions, and have a little bit of social time in our extremely introverted sitting alone at our desks kind of way. And this has actually been incredibly successful. As of this month, we have so few titles on the list that we don't even need this hour every week. But now I'm loathe to cancel it because I can make them work on all kinds of stuff during this hour that they now have set aside to work on projects every week.
So, what I would draw from this is, first stop doing things that don't work, even if they seem like they should work like you should be able to spread in the Spreadsheet to people who work for you, and it's their job to take titles off the spreadsheet. But if it doesn't work, try something else. Schedule something I find people really respect commitments that are in their calendar. So, even if it's not something that seems like a real meeting, if you put a meeting on their calendar, they'll do what you say during that time or you can be for yourself that you will probably do what your calendar says when you don't do what your to-do list or your vague idea of what you should be doing to innovate tells you to do.
Enable other's efforts and that can be as simple as making a Google Spreadsheet, moving something from one corner of a server where it's not accessible to a place where everyone can work on it. And keep your day job is how I describe this sort of innovation idea that I can't start from the top of the company's digital strategy, but I can make a lot of changes in what I'm responsible for, and what the work that I do every day, and I think that's an easy place to start changing the way that you work.
And also, this year, we're adding five minutes of desk yoga to the beginning of rework hour, and I'm not really sure what innovation that points to but just FYI, we're getting good at eagle arms.
A second project we've done is building a ebook bookmaking tool. So, about two years ago, it became apparent to us that the main tool we were using to build ebooks needed to be replaced. Parts of it have been built over a long period, we had a sort of unreliable programmer working on it, who was doing a slow fade on us, and it had a lot of layers and dependencies. So, even he couldn't make updates to it without breaking other functions that came as a surprise to us. So, our production department led an effort to go out and look for vendors who had solutions for this that would take custom XML files and build them into EPUBs. And we sat through a lot of meetings and slide decks from large companies that do this sort of thing. And we spent a lot of time explaining our needs, and sending them samples, and wading through their marketing materials and Iris, I'm sorry, we didn't go with yours.
Iris Amelia Febres: Yeah, thanks.
Theresa: And we were getting quotes in about $100,000, maybe $200,000 range for this project. And at the same time that we were complaining about this to all the folks in e-production that we work with, they convinced us the tool we needed was actually not that complicated. If it was them, they would build it themselves. And a coworker and I who were sitting in these meetings, were also going home and telling our programmer husbands about this experience, and they were saying, "If you're really about to spend $100,000 on that, let me know, because I'll do it for less." So, we did go out to independent programmers and have them bid on it. And my group was able to get this product done for under $10,000.
And so, that was beneficial in terms of saving a lot of money for the company, but what was really beneficial about it for us is that we got to build this tool from the ground up. And instead of buying a finished solution, we were forced to understand every single bit of how our process worked and everything we needed to be built into that tool.
My team was inclined to be a little superstitious about our old tool about like what you could put in it and what would come out as a result. And so, to test iterations of this new tool and to learn to write bugs for our programmer to be very logical about when I put this in, this is what comes out, but this is what I expected to come out, really built their understanding of exactly how ebook making tools work and what we were doing. And that's made them a lot more proficient now in the president at customizing and building our ebooks because they totally understand what inputs to put in to get certain outputs out.
And then when we finished this project, we wanted to show the rest of the company what we've done and why. But we didn't want to explain to them the intricacies of why we have this kind of XML that needs to become then this kind of XML. So, what I finally did was I made a split-screen video that showed me making an ebook with the old tool on one side and ebook with the new tool and the other side, and stopwatch in between to show that the old way took three minutes and the new way took 30 seconds. And I think that's probably the best I've ever done to explaining to people in my company who are non-technical about what we do and why we need them to invest in new tools for us.
So, my lessons here were change the scale, that if you can't take on a project at the $100,000 level, you maybe can take it down to $10,000 level. If you can't do 100 bucks, maybe you can do 10 bucks, or maybe you can do one buck, that changing the size of a problem changes the kinds of tactics you can do to tackle the problem. And if you don't have the power to tackle the problem at the large size, you might get to be a lot more involved in it at the smaller size.
Also use your community. I got so much great advice from different people in the e-production world when we were going out to do this project, and so many different ideas about how they would approach it if it was their problem, which was not the standard view at my company.
Develop your team along with your tools if you're going to do an innovation project, bring your team along because you're going to need them to be there when you get to the finish, and if they've seen all the steps along the way, all of a sudden, they're smarter as well as your tools being smarter.
And then the last step is market your work that once you've done an innovation take the extra hour or half-hour to find a compelling way to explain what you've done to the people in your company who may not be technical, who may not have completely followed along with why you're doing this project.
One last thing for you. About a year ago, my company announced an internal hackathon. And it was framed as being open to the entire company, but it was really mostly for a developer group. So, I know this is true, because you needed to login into the technology group Wiki to sign up for it, which I didn't have. And all the group events were on a floor that we've never been to, and they assigned us a team room to work on, but they didn't know that none of us have laptops, so we couldn't actually go there and work on our project. But my goal wasn't to win the hackathon. It wasn't to demonstrate that we had coding skills that were like our developer groups, it was just, first, to get my team to start thinking of themselves as technical employees, just to convince them that they were allowed to be a part of this, even though the company structure was maybe not conducive to that. And what I wanted to do as a project was to build a website to show that my team, that the HTML and CSS skills that they were using only inside of ebooks would be equally applicable in a context that would be more accessible and understandable to their friends, and colleagues, and families, and everyone they work with. Because unfortunately, an ebook you can send someone an EPUB, and they click on it, and it doesn't open on their computer, and they're like, "Well. moving on." Or, "Can you send me the PDF, great."
And I got to teach my team a bunch of things in the process of working on this, we got everyone using GitHub, making their own branches, and using pull requests to the project, and we got them testing for responsiveness on mobile phones, and we got some good advice from our print designers about how to make our webpage not look like it was straight out in 1998. And one of my employees, despite not knowing any JavaScript herself, got really impatient with waiting for me to fix something and went ahead and did it herself.
And my second goal was to market our group as a technical group, because we have a lot of problems with being embedded in an editorial group where we have technology needs that our bosses aren't accustomed to, or that we can't pay technical salaries. So, we just wanted our division to see the kind of work that we can do, again, in a way that would be really easily accessible to them. And I think this may have actually worked a little bit too well, because our Corporate Communications group was making a video during the hackathon, and they got a little footage of me. There's a picture of me typing at my computer that they now use every time they need a stock image of woman coding. But what we built was an ebook discovery website where you could filter books by different criteria, and then you could click them to get more information about them, and a buy link. And just to be clear, this is very naively done, it is not at all updatable. It is not drawing from a database. And I thought just the experience of building this was as far as the product would go.
But as a coder, recently my boss's boss was looped into a completely different conversation about how our K12 sales staff is having trouble getting information about trade books. And she was able to say, "Hey, you should actually look at this thing that our e-group built." And so, the idea behind our little project was able to be applied to a totally different problem elsewhere in the company.
And my lessons here are just to use your skills in a new way. To take risks in a safe environment if anyone ever invites you to participate in the hackathon, totally do it.
Make a tangible sample or proof of concept. And I think this is really important when we're doing digital work, because we can describe our ideas to people but a lot of people don't totally understand what it is that we're doing and won't go the extra step to download the EPUB and the right software to read it, or go through the steps to get to where you are. So, if you can show them something that represents the work you can do, or the work that you want to do, I think that's really important.
And then along the lines of keep your day job, if you can support your boss's goals or your organization's goals along the lines of the innovation that you wanna do, I find it's a lot easier to get support for it.
Krista: If you'd like to watch these talks or any of the other videos from Tech Forum or ebookcraft in their entirety, check out the link in the podcast description. Thanks to everyone who made the conferences a success, including our amazing speakers, the ebookcraft steering committee, our sponsors, the MaRS Discovery District, the team of BookNetCanada, and everyone who attended. To learn more of our Tech Forum ebookcraft, or more about what BookNet Canada does, please visit booknetcanada.ca. We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund. And of course, thanks to you for listening.
