Last week the PublishingLab participated in the Amsterdam Science & Innovation Award 2016 with the Sausage Machine.

An overview of all the finalist you can find here. Bram Schermers was the big winner with MaMaLoc. The audience award went to Hedy Folkersma. Lastly, the high Potential Award went to Marte Otten with the feeling thermometer.

See underneath the description of the submitted proposal of the Sausage Machine.

Digitalization is turning the publishing field upside down! More and more people use mobile devices to read books and magazines and the coming years this way of information processing will dominate the market. Publishers can’t stay behind in relation to digital publishing. ‘Going electronic’ – or going hybrid – requires changing the way one works during the publishing process, from delivered manuscript to final publication. The software tools currently in use, from word processors such as Microsoft Word to desktop publishing (DTP) suites such as Adobe InDesign, were created for the world of analogue print and desktop publishing.
The Sausage Machine is an experimental system meant to facilitate hybrid text production. This means that you can upload your text files and choose multiple outputs for it whether that is ePub (for reading on your e-reader or mobile), icml (for InDesign print workflows) or html (for web). It builds upon the Hybrid Publishing Toolkit – an effort by a number of researchers and practitioners engaged in various forms of contemporary cross-media publishing. It will make everyone’s life so much easier. No specific expertise of digital technology, or indeed traditional publishing technology, is required.
The Sausage Machine is currently in available beta version. Its skeleton of the project is there, but there are still things to continue with. By winning the Amsterdam Science and Innovation Award we want to develop the Sausage Machine further, and explore its potential.

The PublishingLab is a research lab working at the intersection of publishing and digital technology. We work on several projects in the broad range of the field: the future of journalism, open access and libraries, EPUB development, art writing in an online world and much more. We work with practical experiments in collaboration with partners from the creative industries such as newspaper and magazine publishers, art publications, designers and developers.
The initial concept for the Sausage Machine was conceived and implemented by former PublishingLab employee Gottfried Haider. Future development will be undertaken by the Sausage Machine team: Margreet Riphagen – coordinator PublishingLab, projectlead (image); Miriam Rasch – researcher Institute of Network Cultures, Lucia Dossin – Developer PublishingLab and Jess van Zyl – Freelance Designer