Hackathon Winners: For Book Clubs, Librarians, and Book Readers

August 04, 2025

We had a wonderful turnout of entries from customers and enthusiasts alike! I'm grateful to all of them for their effort and consideration.

Honorable Mentions

Telegram eBook Reader

If you check out the GitHub project, the innovation here is wonderful, to combine tools to make something unique.

Daily Dewey

I'm a Xennial, so I experienced card catalogues, so this one kind of hit me right in the feels. It also could hit a soft spot for librarians, one of our core targets for this hackathon. This plugin is a time-based quiz, revealing more details as the day gets later.

Open Library

Stephen is a prolific plugin creator, and this integration with the Open Library, run by the Internet Archive, is no exception to his excellent (and growing) collection of plugins.

Hardcover.app

This website is so useful to book readers, it seduced multiple plugin authors to create entries featuring the service!

Winners

Book Clubs

Congratulations to Sumalyo D. for their entry: Hardcover - Reading Buddy.

We scored on multiple metrics, but what brought this one to the top of the entries in its category was the focus on mashups, where you could track how your book club friends are doing by reusing the plugin for each individual (2-person mashup seen above). The quadrant view changes the charting to make it more visually interesting:

Librarians

Congratulations to Jaelle S. for their entry: Book by its Cover

Powered by OpenLibrary, by providing a list of OpenLibraryIDs it creates something I've seen a million times, printed a million times, on paper in my local library. Imagery to catch your attention, a description to draw you in, tags to provide context, and a QR code for learning more. :slowclap:.
The Librarians category was the most hotly contested, with the top five entries being all within a 4 point spread.

Book Readers

The largest number of entries, but all of these entries were evaluated for usefulness and creativity by our guest judge, Rick Smolan. The winner received top honors from Rick and, combined with quality code, took the top honor.
Congratulations to David O. for his entry: Bibliothek.

While the screen is in German, the plugin is localized with English descriptions as well.

This plugin gives you a clear overview of your current library loans and their due dates – books, audiobooks, or movies.
It supports many German-speaking public libraries that use the open-source library system Koha. Altogether, they serve more than 2 million people!
Note: Login is currently handled via a proxy script. Since your user ID and password are sent in plain text, we recommend hosting it on your own server for added security.

There are extra steps needed for this one to be publicly released due to security concerns, we'll continue working with David to get this into your hands.

Innovator Award

This award is a gut check, a plugin that met the high bar of being one of the top-scoring plugins, but also was voted on by some of our TRMNL staff.
Congratulations to Ben N. for their plugin: Book Club Planner.

Rather than being powered by a 3rd-party service, this is powered by form fields, to help you stay on track with your reading goals exclusively in TRMNL.

Final Notes

Whenever possible, the plugins were evaluated independent of the contributor or their history with TRMNL products. Additionally, each evaluation category had an individual scoring rubric to reduce bias and increase fairness in scoring. Future hackathons will include more guidance on the least subjective category: TRMNL Native Design.

Our next hackathon is scheduled to launch on August 15, 2025.