research notes
This is an ongoing documentation of our proof-of-concepts and our writings about digital publishing. When an experiment yields results that benefit readers we prepare a comprehensive account. Sometimes we revisit and update the documentation.
book navigator
experiment.
published 2016 March 26
How do you find something you don’t know you are looking for?
As part of an initiative by the German publishers and book sellers association we developed a concept to bring the digital world into book stores. We tried to capture the experience of browsing a physical store and apply it to discovery of digital literature: Serendipitous discovery.
The result is a proof-of-concept to turn book meta-data (like genre and key words) into a representation of physical space. This space can be navigated by users following their emotional response to evocative scenery. A curated set of books to match the elicited emotion is offered to the user in a second interface layer. The second interface layer also provides options to narrow the selection pool by choice of various criteria.
the agnostic digital printing press
experiment.
published 2016 March 26
We are developing a growing set of plugins and HTML-scaffolding to turn texts and media assets into digital books.
The user interface on our site (triggered by the heart at the bottom of the screen) is a result of this process. We bake functionality into the content instead of merely hoping that e-reader software will do our job for us.
The road map is pretty ambitious. We want to make digital reading fully autonomous through dynamic meta-data. What we can offer today is a robust baseline for developing books in browsers. Robust, because our approach completely reduces input to its semantic properties and adds styling and interactivity from there. Just add the plugin you need. Hence, agnostic.
publishing laboratory at your service
Our experiments are meant for the public. We publish our proof-of-concepts, our research notes and papers to document our journey. Check back occasionally, visit our news section and sign up for our newsletter to find out when we have something new in store.
let’s start great things. together.
We remember fondly how we fell in love. Back then, when we discovered reading and embraced it fully. How we discovered new worlds and got lost in them. We want to live the same experience in digital literature, share the wonder and amazement. That is why we created pixelcraftbooks.