 Can you write a book in just 72 hours? It sounds impossible, but welcome to a Book Sprint. Hosted by the Center for Science in the Imagination at Arizona State University, a Book Sprint isn't like writing a regular book, with one author painstakingly considering each word for months. Instead, it's a collaborative work written in just a few days by a diverse group of writers. Exploratory and improvisational, Book Sprints offer scholars a new way to communicate and share their research. Think about the great conversations that happen at academic conferences. Once the meeting is over, people pack up and leave, and many of the important discussions are forgotten or lost. With a Book Sprint, though, participants can come together and create a tangible record of those exchanges. Take, for example, the Society for Scholarly Publishings 2016 annual meeting. Groups of four to six people discuss topics as varied as the future of the scholarly book and whether algorithms and machines deserve authorship credit, and then took 25 to 45 minutes to write something up. The result was an e-book that contained strikingly original pieces that would never grace the pages of standard academic journals. Haikus documenting the struggle of getting a paper published, a fictional letter written to taxpayers humorously highlighting the absurdity of the academic journal system, even a collection of internet memes. Alongside the essays, the pages include photos of the whiteboards used to brainstorm at the meeting, snapshots that put participants back in their seats and help them recall those conversations and allow people who weren't in attendance to imagine themselves there. We don't have to be limited by conventional modes of communication. With the Book Sprint, researchers can share their results in more creative ways and reach new audiences. It's a new kind of scholarly publication that serves as a useful record of conferences and highlights the fundamentally collaborative nature of academic work, all in just 72 hours.