Gamification, social reading, and crowdsourcing were the topics of the night. Here’s a recap of how the night played out.
BookNet Canada’s November 23 Code Meet Print session looks at the brave frontier of …reading! The session, called Reading Is Social, is timely as we move into the season that everyone in the book industry is pumped for—the holidays! Are people still going to buy that someone special a dead tree copy of that great non-fiction title, or are they thinking about how they can really show they care by getting involved in the latest greatest trends in e-reading? How are they going to decide what to pick up for their Secret Santa exchange? Where will they find out about new books?
Questions like these made us wonder: How is the book industry leveraging game mechanics, crowdsourcing, and social platforms to make reading even more attractive?
PubFight. This is serious business around these parts.
Like the intern before me, I had heard of PubFight from my days in Ryerson and my first days here at BookNet. But to hear about a fight club and to actually join a fight club are two entirely different games.
Enhanced books are truly amazing. It seems like everyday a new kind of enhancement is announced or shown off. Videos and images can be embedded or made to pop up, text can be hyperlinked, music can be played, table of contents and indexes can be reinvented and repurposed. But while it’s fascinating to see what can be done, we need to ask ourselves should it be done. Developers can build just about anything, because they’re such a talented bunch, but that doesn’t mean the reader wants it in their e-book.
This is why it seemed like a good time to devote one of our conferences to enhancements and apps. Tech Forum West will do just that this fall.
BookNet Canada is a non-profit organization that develops technology, standards, and education to serve the Canadian book industry. Founded in 2002 to address systemic challenges in the industry, BookNet Canada supports publishing companies, booksellers, wholesalers, distributors, sales agents, industry associations, literary agents, media, and libraries across the country.
