Hello from Zagreb – a report from the digital publishing TALE hackathon

Back in May, we traveled all the way from Utrecht, The Netherlands to Zagreb, Croatia. It was a fun outing for the Immer team, but also a part of our previously announced Creative Europe project ENTALE, as Zagreb served as the backdrop for a creative hackathon.

50 participants worked for 48 hours in and around the Immer philosophy, which led to many interesting and creative ideas for digital publishing that will feed into the rest the European project – and the rest of our work!

Indeed, a big reason to be involved in a project like ENTALE, and help organize hackathons, is to remind ourselves of the philosophy that started it all. We’ve been busy recently, building out our Immer Reading System technology, and shipping modern reading apps and updates with our partners. And even though we’ve also been dreaming up some exciting future projects, it can be easy to lose sight of the big picture.

For us, that big picture is finding ways to evolve digital reading to stand on its own and find its ultimate true self. Now, what is that true self? I don’t think we can ever be sure, but we have to keep looking.

At Immer we like to tell the story of film starting out as stage plays with a camera pointed at them. While modern film still has similarities to theater, movies ultimately became something much more. Something that speaks for itself, that I don’t have to explain here because everybody gets what it is. Similarly, videogames started out as digitally recreated versions of board games, but have since then evolved, often beyond recognition.

We think that digital books have become a little stuck in this phase of being merely digital copies of physical books. Our vision, our philosophy, is that they have the potential to be more. Our mission is to help them get there.

You already see this reflected in our Immer Reading System and the apps we help make with it, serving up books as bite-sized, instant, vertical and social bits of digital-native text. But we are restless. The job is far from done. And we can’t do it alone. While we have many more ideas ourselves, that require more time, effort and funding to develop, there are also limits to our imagination.

Hence the ENTALE project, which aims to make our quest a continent-wide endeavor. Hence our trip to Zagreb, where we tried to inspire others with our ideas, and got a ton of creative energy in return. To share our dreams, and to ask: what would you build?

The TALE hackathon

After arriving in the beautiful city of Zagreb, we started at the Booksa club, operated by our ENTALE partner Kulturtreger. There we shared some of the above thoughts, plus a bunch of examples, in the opening event. Afterwards we had some bites and drinks, and started to get to know each other.

Then we moved to the Zagreb Innovation Center, which normally houses a large number of startups, but over the weekend we had the space almost entirely to ourselves.

The nearly 50 participants – with engineering, design and publishing backgrounds – formed 11 teams. Interestingly, we were also joined by some translators from CELA, a fellow Creative Europe project centered around literary translation. The 3 delegates wrote up their experience in a blog post too.

It was amazing to see with how much focus and effort everybody got to work. It paid off, too! After just 2 days, each team had made something creative, inventive and/or technically impressive, spanning a wide range of themes and concepts. Incredible, to me, is that each of these projects contained something, big or small, that we hadn’t seriously (or even at all) pondered at Immer so far.

Just a few of my favorite examples:

• The fade effect that lets some words (marked by the author or editor) linger longer on the screen than others, after the reader taps to go to the next page
• The VR experience in which walking (through an abstract landscape, in any direction) works to progress through text, a little bit like scrolling
• The reading habit-forming ‘streak’ feature visualized by a piece of Ariadne’s yarn, that’s broken by switching to other apps
• The super-brief AI recap along with each portion of text, giving the reader a new way to skim through parts of a book (and/or read in simplified or translated language) while always keeping the original text close
• The synchronized reading experience that can be controlled among the audiences’ devices by a teacher reading with their class or even by an author on stage during a book event

(I could go on, but then I’d just end up listing all 11.)

3 of the teams won prizes of €3.000 in total:

1. The team that created the fade effect didn’t even win for that, but for the user-friendly editor they designed to let non-technical users apply such effects to texts
2. The team that used AI to generate colors and sounds for a smart home setup, so a reading experience goes from phone-scale to room-scale
3. The team that used eye-tracking for reading, most interestingly when you’re not looking at the screen

The future of ENTALE

We went home with lots of new ideas and an expanded network, and will be working directly with some of the participants to expand on their concepts. Beyond that, we’ll keep simmering in the hackathon’s energy and creativity for a long time, leading to who knows what – and I bet the same is true for many of the people who participated.

Next up for ENTALE is the Utopia Festival in Bogotá & Medellín in Colombia, where we will be testing concepts with authors and people from the publishing industry – the festival is organized by our Portuguese partner, The Book Company. Then in November we plan to launch an app for book festivals, that will be introduced to other festivals over 2026.

We’re also already starting to think about the next steps after that. What else can we do to encourage creativity in digital publishing, develop better technology, and to create new business models so the results can help strengthen the publishing ecosystem? In other words, what else can we do to let digital books find their true self?

If you’re a European organization interested in these ideas and want to join a follow-up Creative Europe project, we encourage you to get in touch.

Niels ’t Hooft
Co-founder & CEO Immer