Writer and academic Tom Abba attended Book Hack Day on Saturday. This event looked to hack the form of the book. Tom has kindly reviewed the event for FutureBook: From Paul Squires and Nico MacDonald's opening remarks, through Dan Franklin's call to arms for the bookhackers present, sat a question that wasn't easily answered - what exactly comprises a book hack?

Until now, hack days, (to this author at least) have singled out the significance of APIs, datasets and code; elements that would not, at first glance, co-exist easily with the physicality of the printed page. Books are physical things, and don't play easily with digital content (a topic Umberto Eco and Jean-Claude Carrière explore in This Is Not The End Of The Book, gifted to hackers at the end of the day).

Among the data contributed, Alex Butterworth's The World That Never Was and Nick Harkaway's The Gone-Away World were traditional, authored books to be hacked. Other content on offer constituted datasets from the BBC, objects and text from outline chapters and online experiments, and huge collections of stuff - data and content ripe for reworking. Aside from writers, academics and designers, the assembled bookhackers identified themselves overwhelmingly as coders, manglers of data and writers in their own regard, albeit in a new language. A stage was set for an interesting, unknown day of work.

And work we did. Dan Franklin had challenged us to rethink how we wrote, how we wanted readers to encounter our work. Becky Hogge proposed re-engineering the writing process itself. Within each hack was a desire to broaden minds and reshape the terms of engagement. The book and digital space did meet and collaborate, throwing out hacks to annotate, to organise and enhance the creative process, hacks that thought about form and reading, and about content.

In the final reckoning then, the presence of that elephant was the greatest strength of Book Hack Day. The book wasn't reinvented, nor was the writing process completely re-engineered, but every discussion circled those topics in an interesting, essential way. Among the stimulating talks and conversations, 'paradigm' was employed to describe the missing bit of the jigsaw for authors, coders and publishers. A model for digital publishing to work with, against and around. We didn't create a paradigm on Saturday, but when we finally do, bookhackers will have played its part in getting us there.  

Photos on flickr: http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=bookhackday

Tom Abba is a writer and academic based in the Digital Cultures Research Centre at the University of the West of England. He has just completed a digital storytelling project that he can't tell you about yet, but promises to spill the beans very soon.