Computer, Find Me a Book

On an overcast weekend in May, several dozen publishing wonks welcomed their Web-developer counterparts to a Midtown high-rise for the first-ever publishing hackathon. The objective was to spend thirty-two hours there, toiling away on “book discovery”—the creation of a kind of virtual P.A. system to beckon shoppers into the book aisle.

Just as authors sit hunched over computers across New York City, tending to their ambitions, hackers occupy the same coffee shops, writing lines of code that often go unrecognized. Many of them attend hackathons—marathons for software developers and designers—on the weekends, looking for the right project with which to launch a career, or at least to tinker with a start-up. The theme of book discovery seemed to resonate with them. The hack was to begin on Saturday morning, but the first arrivals showed up eagerly on Friday evening, around six o’clock, and spent the night. They crept through the passageways of AlleyNYC, a sixteen-thousand-square-foot communal workspace for start-ups—or, in tech’s vernacular, an “incubator”—that hosts at least one big hackathon a month. Its cruise director was Jason Saltzman, adorned with arm tattoos, a newsboy cap, and Drew Carey glasses. “It’s the usual suspects,” he said, as developers, laptops in hand, squeezed past him into a large, open room with lime-colored walls. “They’re searching.”

By ten o’clock on Saturday, the event’s organizers, Rick Joyce and Joanna Stone Herman, greeted two hundred incoming participants. Joyce, the chief marketing officer of Perseus Book Group, looked like an accountant on a field day: he pulled a blue hackathon T-shirt over his button-down and black slacks. Stone Herman, a petite, bubbly woman who is working on a social e-reading start-up called Librify, was stationed in the entryway. She was surrounded by developers, many of whom towered over her—especially Igor, who paced back and forth in neon-green running sneakers.

Igor and the rest took their seats in white folding chairs arranged auditorium-style. Joyce launched into the weekend’s agenda, assisted by Richard Nash, the founder of the book start-up Small Demons, and David Riordan, of the New York Public Library’s Labs division. They explained that book discovery is a crippling problem for publishers (as data has shown). “We would not need a publishing hackathon if we were not in the age of abundance,” Nash said, getting up out of his chair. “When we have all the food in the world, what happens? We become obese. When we have too much of something, we don’t know what to do with it.” The coders typed notes as they listened. Joyce advised, “If all we do is make books discoverable to people looking for a book to read, then we haven’t really rocked it.”

The developers lined up to propose their ideas and find teammates, an exercise Stone Herman described as “half junior-high dance, half matchmaking.” The most striking suitor was a middle-aged gentleman known as V, who was dressed in a military outfit and had more hair hanging down from the sides of his head than on top. “He comes dressed for war every hackathon,” Saltzman said.

V, who was laid off from his job as a security specialist and taught himself software engineering, attends two or three hackathons every month. At fifty-seven, he was one of the more senior participants. “Hackathon is my idea of partying all weekend, all night, and partying hard,” he said. V wasn’t drawn to this one for its literary sheen, though. “Books? Um, not necessarily books as such, but books as part of an ecosystem that includes pamphlets and multimedia,” he said of his interest in the publishing angle. “I hate crap. But I understand crap is a part of culture. So the question is, how do we organize all that crap?”

They got to work. Igor played around with Instagram, and created an account, called Mrs. Meme, on which he posted a photo of a cat with a line from “Anna Karenina”: “Is it really possible to tell someone else what one feels?” He figured this would be the best way for books to go viral. A six-person team constructed Captiv, a recommendation engine that mines personal tweets and world events for keywords, and drops off a pertinent quotation from a book on your screen. Another group built KooBrowser, which makes title suggestions by scanning through the data in your Web browser. “We believe that your browser knows you best,” its developers told the hackathon’s judges.

On Sunday afternoon, thirty teams gave demonstrations. The six finalists would have ten days to work out the kinks before Book Expo America, the publishing industry’s Fashion Week, which takes place from May 29th to June 1st. The hackers behind the winning project will get ten thousand dollars and a pitch meeting with the Hollywood agent Ari Emanuel. Captiv and KooBrowser made the cut, as did proposals for geolocation-based book-recommendation services, a cover-browsing system, and a hub for character profiles from young-adult literature. The most promising ideas involved data-swiping—calculating a formula to match books with readers based on their preferences and online habits.

But the romance wasn’t lost entirely. Jennifer 8. Lee, a former New York Times reporter who founded Plympton, a digital publisher for serial fiction, tossed out her idea for a literary hook-up app, Booklvrs, saying, “We should combine Grindr with books.” The judges laughed nervously. “I’m actually not planning to do this app, but somebody should take this idea and run with it,” she said. A voice called out from the side of the room, “There was actually another group that made a book-porn app, but they didn’t submit in time.”

After the demos, everyone headed toward the beer coolers. “It’s a mix of interesting ideas and sketchy implementation,” Joyce told me, before ducking into the judges’ deliberation room. Stone Herman and Saltzman hovered in a narrow hallway. Stone Herman was gushing. “The publishing industry has been really insular,” she said. “There are people here from totally different industries—like someone from defense technology!”

A tall, stringbean-skinny kid stumbled over in a happy daze. Saltzman gave him a high five. It was Aaron Landy, a seventeen-year-old high-school student with braces and a yarmulke. Landy had developed a reader-generated review site called Meadows over the past two days. He looked exhausted. This was his first hackathon, and he slept at the Alley on Saturday night. (He called his parents the next morning to let them know.) “I love books,” Landy told me. “I read George R. R. Martin’s ‘Game of Thrones’ before they even announced they were making a series.” Landy did not become a finalist, but it wasn’t a wasted weekend. “I made a lot of friends here,” Landy said, sticking two thumbs up. “It was cool.”

Illustration by Steve Powers.