Over 50 tech printies turned up to hoist a beer to the changing dynamics of the reading world last Wednesday night at our third Code Meet Print event.
Gamefication
Tim Maly of Quiet Bablyon kick started the night with an insightful, honest discussion of how game mechanics might be leveraged by the publishing industry. Tim gave a great overview of what a game actually is. We thought we knew the answer to this question but it turns out that the question is really pretty hard to answer since there are so many kinds of games.
Tim also pointed out that so far gamefication has been a disappointment:
“…points, badges, and trophies are really the least interesting thing about games.”
Points and badges really need to mean something to players to be a proper incentive to play. He then awarded 10,000 points to the crowd ;)
Games are a way of learning things, a string of difficult decisions—interesting decisions that have doable solutions. And of course, games are already inherently fun. Most games don’t need points to help you have more fun.
Social Reading
Tony O’Donoghue from Kobo followed and gave a great view into his world where he gets to work in the iOS environment trying to figure out what to do with e-books. He compared the kind of solutions that the e-book world has come up with so far to the early automobile that was designed with a whip holder. We just haven’t imagined where all of this could go yet.
Tony showed us Pulse, Kobo’s next iteration in their build out of social reading. Pulse made me think that this would be the perfect e-book club environment and that book club will not be limited to Thursday nights around a bottle of chianti and cupcakes. People see your favourite books, read your favourite quotes from the book, and follow your notes in real time. As Tony said this kind of reading could naturally lead to the perfect dating site!
Crowdsourcing
Erin Balser was our third speaker. She bustled in after a whirlwind day of rubbing shoulders with the rich and famous at CBC Books where they launched the Canada Reads finalist list and revealed the superstar panel who will debate the merits of the five books. Erin let us in a bit on the backstory of crowdsourcing the Canada Reads longlist of books (it’s the second year they’ve run Canada Reads this way). She talked about the engagement from the audience, the rise in ratings that accompanied this strategy and the strategy to prevent the voting from being gamed and other issues that arose.
All in all a great night where the audience was relaxed, networking was happening and insights were shared—not to mention everyone collect thousands of points! Hope to see you at our next one!
