ePub/eBook Hackday

The DevCSI (Developer Community Supporting Innovation) Project has organised a free [*] 2-day event in Bristol over 13-14 December 2010 in conjunction with the JISC-funded Application Profiles Support Project. This hackday event will bring together software developers, project managers and users particularly (though not exclusively) in Higher Education who share an interest in eBooks and particularly the open ePUB standard for ebooks.

Developers and users rarely have the opportunity to experiment in a focused way in modifying systems, experimenting with standards, and exploring current ways of doing things and how they could be improved. If this is you, would you like to explore the possibility of doing some innovative things using the standard or the various open source tools available?

If you have yet to attend a hackday event and would like to see what goes on, do take a look at the DevCSI Reading List Hackday which took place in Cambridge over 22-23 July 2010.

We are delighted to announce that Kovid Goyal, the principle creator of Calibre (a very widely used suite of open source software for the management of ebooks with over 2 million downloads) will be the main speaker and one of the main facilitators for the event. We are equally pleased to confirm that Mikhail Gusarov of OpenInkpot, which is a free and open-source Linux distribution for eBook reading devices, will also be participating both as a speaker and facilitator.

As it is our policy to ensure delegates have ample opportunity to contribute, we have left space in the programme for plenty of lightning talks by other participants.

So, just bring a laptop, an ebook reader (if you have one) and lots of ideas and enthusiasm! We will be providing opportunities before the event to discuss ideas, form teams, etc, using the following newly created mailing list:
http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/EPUB-EBOOKS
email address: epub-ebooks@jiscmail.ac.uk

We will be posting messages there in the next few days to get discussion going.

Places are limited, so book early, as we anticipate a lot of demand for this pre- Christmas hack event!

For further information, see:
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/events/devcsi/epub_hackdays/

* Please note this is a payable event for delegates from the commercial sector.

DevCSI (Developer Community Supporting Innovation) is a JISC-funded project managed by UKOLN to support and inform developers in Higher Education.