The Publishing Hackathon, a collaborative digital programming event for the book publishing industry focused on solving the digital discovery challenge, happened over 32 hours last weekend. Organized by Perseus Books Group and Librify, the event at The AlleyNYC, a digital co-working space, was attended by 200 people and featured 30 teams working through the night to develop new ideas for digital book discovery.

The finalists were announced Sunday:

-BookCity (Vincent Trivett, Charlie Gaines, Nathan Gao) – a way to find books set in your travel
destination

-Captiv (Christina Zou, Lucas Lemanowicz, Russell Huang, Dmitry Pyatin, Wei Yin, Kane Hsieh)
an approach to mining events both global and personal to make better book recommendations

-Coverlist (Dani Frankhauser and Chris Ciabarro) – a solution focused on the joy of browsing
jackets

-Evoke (Lisa Maione, Jason Pearson, Jill Axline) – a way to discover young adult literature through
characters

-KooBrowser (Sage Wohns, Ahmed El Kholy, Marmina Abdelmalek, Tarek ElElaimy, Mohamed
Altantawy) – an approach to making better book recommendations based on browsing history

-LibraryAtlas (Michael del Castillo, Monica Katz, David Lau, Andrew Leung, Peter Rood, Aaron Siewert, Gabriel Troia) – a book discovery solution based on geolocation

The finalists will receive coaching from publishing and technology mentors and have 10 days to work on their project before attending Book Expo America and pitching their ideas on May 31 at 3 pm.