 Aloha and welcome to today's episode of Creative Contributions. I'm your host today, Justine Espiritu, and I have a good friend of mine on as a guest to talk about a couple different book projects that he has started here in Hawaii. His name is Mark Watkins, and I'm really excited to feature him and get the background on what kind of motivated these projects and what they are contributing to our community and what is coming up in the near future with them. So thank you so much for joining me today, Mark. Hi Justine, thank you so much for having me. You are welcome. So I want to start off with a Hawaii book project. So yeah, why don't you give us a description of that and then kind of get into it. Yeah, it's a personalized book discovery engine. So it learns what authors you like, what kind of books you like to read. Maybe you're interested in sustainability like I know you are. And it just kind of fans out into the internet and scans and sees what everybody's writing about, what is NPR writing about, what is the New York Times writing about, what is your favorite sustainability blog writing about in terms of books. It figures out what those interesting books are and it brings them to you. And so it's instead of Amazon telling you everybody's reading this book and you should read it too, which isn't very personalized, it's bringing you books that are right for you. Okay, and so it's an online platform. It's an online platform. You sign up. It's The Basic Service is free. It's at TheHawaiiProject.com. And you go through a little process where you tell it what kind of books you're interested in and that can be as interested as simple as saying I like mysteries or as complicated as here's 20 authors that I'm interested in. Tell me when any of them releases a new book. Okay, so what kind of motivated this? I think before the internet, how did people pick books? They were just in the library searching around or just word of mouth? Yeah, so if you look at the research for how people find books, even though they're all these great online resources like Amazon, most people don't actually find their books online. Most people find their books through their friends, and there's a lot of research that shows that, that people find out about books by talking to their friends. And that's great, but my friends don't read what I read. My wife's my best friend, but she reads Michael Connolly thrillers and I don't care about those, so that's not a very helpful recommendation. And what I found in my own life was I just kept missing out on really interesting books by my favorite authors, like my favorite author released a book and nobody bothered to tell me about it. So I built something for myself and then I had a little window of time where I had a chance to build something. I built companies, that's what I do. And so I had a little window where I could try to build a company around this and so that's what eventually became the Hawaii Project is something that would do that same thing for anyone. Okay, and this is a membership-based thing. There's kind of a free access service, and then if you can kind of talk about what membership gets or what would incentivize someone to be a member. Basically, for free, you can sign up, you can personalize, you can get all the recommendations you want. You can save books in your account so you can kind of keep a list of things you might be interested in reading and you can keep up to 25 books in your list. You can follow up to 10 authors in your list, and that's all free. And so for people who really use the system a lot, so I have, you know, it's terrible. I have 500 books on my to-be-read list, on my cue to read. And so I would be in that category of someone who would pay for the service because they're using it a lot. But most people use it for free. Maybe like 5 or 10% of the people actually end up paying for it. And that's just fine with me. Like I'm fundamentally driven here. For me, I'm driven to get people to read better books. And so if more people are reading more, then that's a good thing. Is there any way to track if people are reading more? To kind of, what's the word, like that metric? Do you know if people are reading more because of this? So yes and no. So one of the things that the system will let you do is track the books that you've read. So you can just check the check mark on a book and that tells the system that you've read it and that that's a book that you're interested in or maybe you've read in the past and so we won't recommend it to you again. Okay. And so in that sense, yes, I can see if you've read it. A lot of people are reading offline, right? Even though there's been a lot of discussion about Kindle books and e-reading and audio books, I think most reading is actually still happening on physical books. And so that's not a digital experience. And so I may or may not know. You can tell me but you don't have to tell me whether or not you've read it. And so some of the other, why don't you talk about some of the other features such as the lists? I can kind of talk about what I liked about that. Maybe I'll start with that. Yeah, please. So what I found or maybe what you suggested is that you can start lists of books. So for me, I have a book club and I wanted a way to show folks here's what we're reading and also a way to kind of crowdsource people to make suggestions. So your platform is really great. You know, we put in the 12 titles. So you just kind of type in the title to your list and it pops up. And so we have this beautiful list of everything we read. It's not just the title and then like a hyperlink to, you know, the Wikipedia page. It's the book cover. It's just very aesthetically pleasing and great. Cover art is actually, it is art, right? I mean a lot of that is just pretty to look at. I've often thought I should just build a screensaver that just shows the cover art, you know, because it's really pretty. That's true. And I just went and saw the David Sidaris event and he had this whole story about like choosing the cover art and stuff. So it's an awesome way to like pay respect to the artist of that. Yeah. A lot of effort goes into that because a lot of money rides on it, right? They say you can't judge a book by its cover but a lot of people do. Yeah. So yeah, I think a list is a really powerful feature. So you can build a list of, you know, these are the books I want to read next week or these are my favorite books about sustainability or these are books that I want to share with some other people because I think they may be interested in it. And then you can have a little running dialogue on the page too, you know, kind of like a mini Facebook page where you can discuss. I think this book would be really interesting for our club and here's why or I think we should read this book. And so you get a little bit of a community going around that. That's what I like. I have kind of our static page of what we're currently reading but then I have another list that is just crowdsourcing throughout the whole year because my book club makes our list in December. So with this platform, folks at any time, instead of like emailing me directly their titles or authors, we have this like beautiful online platform that is available for everyone to kind of see and check out and make suggestions. I call it like a trapper keeper, right? It's kind of like a trapper keeper for all the books you want to read. You run across something, you just save that away at the next meeting, maybe we'll come back and talk to it and decide whether that's something we want to read or not. Because that happens a lot, right? I think a lot of books that people read, it's very serendipitous, right? It's not like I'm going to lay down here the next 40 books I'm going to read. People are going through their lives and something kind of comes in their ear. They hear an article on the radio, a new story on the radio about such a book or they read something in the paper and they scribble it down for later. And so this is just kind of a way to organize all of that stuff. And for myself, I think that list feature really became kind of a jumping off point for some of the things that I've been thinking about more recently around community and social. The original experience that I built was very sort of solitary and personalized, right? It's like, these are your books and I'm going to bring them to you. I'll send you an email once or twice a week with some ideas. But very much focused on just you. And that's important and a lot of people read that way, but a lot of people read very socially too. So they're in a book club or they're looking for a community that they can join. And that also kind of bleeds into books and spirits that we'll talk about a little bit later. But I've been thinking a lot about those kind of community activities around reading and how can we get people reading more books. Part of that is giving them better ideas for books to read. But the other part of it I think is creating a community or even it may, that community may be just you and I are, let's read a book together. So I created a feature called a reading and you can invite people to it. You can punch in their emails. They get a little email that says, Mark wants to read such and such a book with you. And then as you're reading, you can kind of write notes. You can share ideas or things you noticed. You can say, I'm on chapter 12. Where are you? Where did you already create this between when we talked about it on Wednesday night or Tuesday night and today? Parts of it already existed. And I've actually, after talking with you, I did some more things. But I had, for me, a very special experience. I read about five years ago, I got my son a copy of Dune, right? Science fiction classic, which I love to read growing up. And I got my son a copy of it for Christmas five or six years ago. And he had never really gotten around to reading it. You know, sometimes Christmas gifts take a little while to develop. But about the time I was thinking about this, he said, hey, I'm thinking about reading Dune. What do you think? And I said, that's a great idea and I'll read it with you. And so I actually created one of these readings with him. And so he's back in Massachusetts. I'm here. And so it's actually a way of sort of creating a relationship with him, right? We're reading the book together and sharing, you know, thoughts and reflections. And I'm telling him things that maybe he wouldn't have thought of. He's doing the same for me. And it really does create a little bit more of a sense that you're in touch with somebody in a way that you wouldn't otherwise be. So I'm very excited in that kind of social dimension, not necessarily what my friends are reading, because I don't, like I said before, I don't necessarily read what my friends read. But when I do or, you know, I can even imagine that I might want to do this with a stranger. Just like, hey, I'm thinking about reading Sovereign Sugar, which is a book you and I read together. Does anybody else want to read that? Are you interested in the history of Hawaii and how sugar affected it? And, you know, sort of creating a virtual community kind of on the fly. So can you distinguish that? Are you familiar with Goodreads? I am. Can you kind of distinguish between Goodreads and what you're offering? Yeah. I mean, there's some similarities. But I think the main difference, I think, is Goodreads. I think of Goodreads as being kind of a macro version of TripAdvisor. It's a huge pile of reviews. So it's not hard to find a book that has 20 or 30,000 reviews people have written. And I don't think that's particularly helpful. I'm not going to read those 20,000 reviews. I don't know those people. I don't have any relationship with them. So what they think about this book maybe doesn't really help me that much. And I think about it as, you know, my Facebook friends, right? So I'm connected to all my Facebook friends on Goodreads. And this is one of the ways that I know that I don't want to read what my friends read because I see it on Goodreads. I see what they're reading and I'm go, not interested. Different. Yeah. Well, no. But, you know, again, it's just sort of, you know, their interests aren't my interests. And so I think there's an opportunity for something that's more interest-driven, more passion-driven. I'm passionate about, you know, sailing or I'm passionate about sustainability. And I want to read books about sailing. And I want to find people who want to read books about sailing and share experiences with them. It's kind of like food, right? If you like sushi, you don't want our sushi recommendation from people who eat Italian food, right? You want a sushi recommendation from people who eat a lot of sushi. Yeah. Same thing. If I'm going to read a book about sustainability, I want to know what you're reading. You know, I don't want to know what my wife is reading because she doesn't read those books. So. On that note of tons of reviews, can you kind of explain the technical part of it of where these reviews are coming from? Because you're kind of plugged into a small number? Or I don't know if it was a large 100? Thousands? Okay, thousands. Okay, a small number. But explain where you're getting your reviews from and why you think they're different. Yeah. This is the other reason why I think what I'm doing is different. So Goodreads is sort of everyone on the planet writing their book reviews about books. And again, that's interesting at some level. But what I do is a little different. I look at sort of the bookish part of the internet. So what is the New York Times review of books writing about? What is NPR's books editor writing about? There's a guy on the web called Large-hearted Boy. You probably haven't heard of him, but he curates books and music. And he's always throwing off really interesting strange indie music and really cool books. And so I see what books those people are writing about. So the technology literally reads their web pages and says, oh, NPR is writing about Colson Whitehead's new book. Okay, that goes in the hopper as a book. It's probably interesting. If NPR is talking about a book, it's probably interesting. And so it's really, I call it sort of taste makers and curators, right? These are the real people who have depth of insight about books and have a real passion for books. What are they talking about? That's where the interesting sort of signal is for, is this a book that's worthy of my time? What about more obscure than you're only kind of looking at those, the well, I don't know what the word, but they're out there. Like how do you ever pick up like obscure kind of thing? So the sources, I mentioned for example like NPR and New York Times because those are names people can relate to, they know what that is. But I'm scanning about a thousand sources. And some of these sources are very obscure. They may be a sustainability blog. Personally, I can admit this on the air I think. I'm interested in medieval history. So I've scanned a bunch of medieval history blogs. And this is, I'm telling you, this is pretty obscure stuff. And I see what those people are writing about. And so I do actually find a lot of obscure books. On the flip side. Do you get really excited when someone clicks that interested in medieval? You're like, there's more people. I'm afraid so. Oh, there is somebody else. Yeah. But I will tell you, if none of those thousand sites are writing about a book, like if there's Book X and nobody is writing about it, there's probably a reason for that. And that's, I think, to me that's the essence of it is I'm only finding books that people find meaningful enough to write about. Okay. Versus anybody can go online on Amazon and write a review. Okay, great. So it's really curated. Qualified and curated. Yeah. And I've curated those thousand sources for myself by hand. Awesome. So I know they're all solid. Cool. Well, we're going to take a one minute break and then I want to ask you one more question about this and then we'll move on to books. Awesome. So we'll be right back. Super. Thanks. I'm a marriage and family therapist and I do shrink wrap, which is now going to every other week, all during the summer and maybe forever after. Take care of your mental health this summer. Have a good time. Do what's fun and take good care of yourself. Bye-bye. You're watching Think Tech Hawaii, Hawaii's leading digital media platform for civic engagement, raising public awareness on tech, energy, diversification and globalism. Great content for Hawaii from Think Tech. Aloha. My name is Carl Campania and I am the host of Think Tech Hawaii's Education Movers, Shakers and Reformers. I invite you to come watch our show on ThinkTechHawaii.com. You can also see our shows on YouTube as well. You can Google search those. I appreciate the time. I hope that you do join us as we learn about education, about the educational system here in Hawaii, what the challenges are, what the benefits are and how much our kids are learning. So thank you. Hope you join us. I'm happy to join because I came here to build it. Aloha and welcome back to Creative Contributions. I'm your host, Justine Espiritu. I'm here with Mark Watkins, who is the founder of the Hawaii Project, which you can find at the hawaiiproject.com. So we spent the last segment kind of getting into detail about that. I'm just going to ask a couple more questions to wrap that up. So it's accessible for free and offers a lot of services, but there's also an option for membership and you're paying for some extra stuff, and you do some cool stuff with some of that revenue. Yeah, so the passion for me is literacy. I really do believe, I have a tagline, I call it books change lives, and they do, right? Most of us who read books, we read a book when we were a child or when we were adult or last week that really impacted us in some positive way. And that's the real driver for me is books change people's lives and get more people reading. So part of that is the service and I generate revenue from the service and we give 10% of that revenue. We have three literacy nonprofits that we work with. One of them is here in Hawaii, HawaiiLiteracy.org, which does great work with literacy and reading here in the local community. There's another organization called Library for All, which has, interestingly, working with eBooks in the developing world and getting eBooks into the developing world. And so we fund a little bit of money to them in hopes that they will help other people read great books. That was two. Yes, the third one doesn't actually like to be named, so I won't name them. Super secret, it's not the CIA. Awesome. Okay, and so again, people can find that at the hawaiiproject.com. Yep. Okay. So next, let's talk about books and spirits. Yeah, two of my favorite subjects. Yeah, just go for it. So as you know, through you, I met this really interesting character, Stuart Holmes Coleman. He wrote a really well-known book here in the community. He wrote about Eddie Akao, Eddie would go. And Stuart and I just hit it off. We're both super passionate about creating community around books, not just reading good books ourselves, but how can we share that? How can other people sort of have a community experience around books? And we hit on this thing. At some point, Stuart just blurted out something about books and spirits, and we went, ah, that's it. And so what we do is we find books and authors that we think have relevance for the local community. It may be because they've written about Hawaii. It may be because they're writing about some topic which is super relevant to Hawaii. We bring them here. We do sort of an author interview, meet and greet. People get a chance to really interact with the authors in a way that they otherwise wouldn't, which is for me, I've had that experience a few times in my own life where I was just having a chance to meet an author that I really admire. And it's just like a super special experience. And we thought, how can we scale that experience somehow? And so that's one thing we do. The other thing we do is we work with local restaurants or mixologists. We love to work with ones that are focused on sustainability, ocean friendly restaurants. And they bring in poos and they make custom cocktails. And the cocktails are usually themed for the book or themed for the author. So we have a literary speakeasy. We have really interesting authors, really interesting drinks. And we usually get between 15 and 100 people for the events, always have room for more. And it's just a really great experience to have a community experience around a book where you can talk to people you don't know about the book. We all know our friends. We know what they think. But when you meet somebody you don't know and you have a chance to sort of share an experience around a book, you get a kind of dialogue that you don't get otherwise. Right. You kind of get to just cut to the chase of, oh, you're here because you are interested in this book or this topic. It kind of jump starts like a friendship. It is. I mean, I've heard some really fun stories. I've heard some, honestly, some heartbreaking stories of, you know, some of the books that we've had. So the book that we had this week, and in fact there's another event tonight that I'll talk about with the same authors. We had The Book of Joy by Doug Abrams who co-authored a book with the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu. And it's a book about how to find joy in your life, especially when life's not so good. And, you know, I heard some heartbreaking stories from people like, why are you here? You know, we like to ask people that, why are you here? And you hear these stories. And these books touch those people's lives. And so it's just to be able to be a part of that experience is really special. We're, before Books and Spirits started, because it's relatively new. Yes. The last Tuesday was the third or fourth event. Fourth. Fourth event. Yeah. Okay, so what were you seeing that, has there been other author events? I mean, what was existing before? Was there really a... You will often see authors come to a bookstore and sign books. And you stand in a long line. No cocktails. No cocktails. And the author signs your book and you leave. You know, and you say hi, and he says hi, or she says hi, and you leave. And there's not a lot of experience there. Yeah, you have a signed book and you got to meet them, but not a lot of experience there. And so we have a much longer event. It usually runs two or three hours. And everybody has a chance to really engage in a meaningful way with the authors. And it's a small enough group that there's time to do that. And so to me, that's what's really special about it, is the chance to really engage with these authors in a way that I don't really know of another forum where you can do that. If you want to name... So what were the first four authors? Yeah, so we had... And they're all great books. We had... Jamal Yogas was our first author and he wrote a book called Salt Water Buddha, which is just a... It's a... Running away from home and growing up in Hawaii's story. And just really fun. And he's a very wise man, wise beyond his years. He's not that old, but very wise. We had David Helvarg, who was here for the Environmental Conference, and has written a number of books about ocean conservation. And we had William Finnegan show up, who's a Pulitzer Prize winner, which is super exciting. I know you had a little experience of your own with him on the water, which is pretty exciting. And that was really exciting to just talk to him and hear his stories about growing up surfing, growing up here. And then last night we had Doug Abrams, who co-wrote the book with the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Tutu. His wife Rachel, Dr. Rachel, is a very well-known doctor, a doctor to many very powerful and wealthy people, and the number one doctor in Santa Cruz. And she wrote a book called Body Wise, which is all about listening to your body and what it's telling you. And she had a lot of really interesting stories about people whose bodies were telling them things that, you know, they were in a bad relationship. Their body was telling them that. And just a lot of really interesting stories about, you know, how, if you just kind of listen to what's going on with yourself, you can learn things. And so it was a really interesting pair, their husband and wife, obviously. And it was just really interesting to sort of compare that sort of how to listen to your body but also how to listen to your brain and your heart. And it was really good. So they are actually speaking at the University of Hawaii tonight at 6.30. And that event is free. And it's going to be really fun. So it's going to be at the School of Architecture Auditorium in room 205. And if you go to booksandspirits.com, there's information about the event. So if people are listening and they want to run up there to see it, it'll be great. I'll be there. It'll be good fun. So who is on your wish list of authors? Yeah. So the person who's on my wish list, and we've been in touch with her, and I'm hoping we can make it happen this summer, is Kiana Davenport. So she's written any number of truly beautiful novels, set here on Hawaii or leveraging Hawaiian history and culture. So she wrote a book. It's one of the best books I've ever read called Song of the Exile, which is really about the history of Hawaii sort of pre-World War II and then through World War II and the Comfort Women, that thing that happened. A very powerful book. And so I've had a couple of conversations with her. She's not in the islands at the moment, but I'm hoping she's going to come this summer. So that's the one I'm really excited to get. We had an event scheduled with Kalli Hart Hemings, who is another very well-known local author. And we had to rearrange some schedules. She's the author of The Descendants. She wrote The Descendants. Her most recent book is How to Party with an Infant, which is not quite as somber as The Descendants, but very good fun, both of them. So we're hoping to get her at some point in the future as well. Okay. And then a question I had, I talked to Stuart about early on, who are you trying to get to come to these events? Is it folks that have already read it and have the connection to it or are you also trying to lure people into reading it? Yeah, that's a good question. We're trying to get anybody who's interested in books and community to come to it. And it's kind of an interesting thing with these events, because I know the author's coming, and so if I haven't read their book, I usually read their book before they come, but I've also started, after a couple of the events, I've realized that meeting the author and having a chance to talk to them and hear them actually gave me a lot of perspective on the book that I wish I hadn't read the book first. Yeah. Or even just a chapter or two. So kind of read it with that lens of hearing their kind of motivation or the stories behind it. Yeah. So the Book of Joy, I read about three or four chapters. And then I said, you know what, I'm going to stop, because I want to hear Doug, I want to hear the stories, because then when I read the book, I'm going to have that kind of perspective to it. So we do sell books at the events, and I would say probably at least half the people who come buy books at the event, get them signed by the author. So a lot of people are coming who haven't read the books yet. Yeah. And to me, that's good. If everybody who comes has already read the book, they have a great experience, but we haven't really introduced them to a great book. And so for me, the most fulfilling thing is people come to this event, they have a good time, they get some community, and they go, wow, I didn't know about this book. I'm going to go read it now. And we feel like we sort of helped them in that sort of discovery process of finding something meaningful to read. Have you got any feedback from the authors that this is more fun than their typical book signing tour? Without exception. Yeah. All of them are like, this is great. Can we do this again? Yeah. They really are having a good time with it, which is also fun. Being on book tours, it's kind of like being in a rock band. You go to every Barnes & Noble in the country, and it can be kind of a grind. And so I think they really enjoy it, and they don't get cocktails at Barnes & Noble either. Yeah. Also, maybe you want to recognize Revolution has hosted you guys in their awesome showroom. They are extremely generous. So Revolution Smart Home, they offer up, they have a great sort of communal space at their corporate offices. They offer that up to us for free. They're always there, too. It's not just the space, but they actually come and invest their personal time in it, and they're really excited about it. So that's been super. There are a bunch of people who volunteer who help us. Both of our wives, Stuart and I, I think are both pretty creative, but organization isn't necessarily our strong suit. So our better halves kind of keep the train on the wheel, on the rails. Definitely want to recognize Michelle and Kerry. Yes, and you are such a wonderful volunteer, too. You always show up with a smile on your face. And every event that we do, people who come to the show, I get mails from the master saying, can I help? I want to volunteer. So that's another way that you sort of go, okay, this is resonating with people. Not only do they want to come back, but they want to help. Yeah, they want to be a part of it. And then it's working. So that's the strongest signal for me when people are like, oh, well, I want to come help. Can I come early and set up chairs or whatever? So really fun. Yeah. One question. Wait, what was I going to say? I would mention some of the restaurants because they provide all the stuff. Yeah, we've got 60 seconds left. So why don't we do a plug for some of the restaurants? Yeah. So most recently we had the Cocoa Head Cafe. Bevy has done an event with us. Mudhen Water has done an event with us. The Nook. And the Nook has done an event with us. Yeah. And they've all been amazing things and all very different. So it's really, if you're a foodie, it's worth coming because interesting stuff shows up at these. Yeah. We see we diffuse vodka cocktail, for example. One story I heard last night or on Tuesday was one of the cocktails that was created for Barbarian Day's event is now on their permanent menu. Is that right? I hadn't heard that, but that's sweet. Maybe I made that up. I forget. Never let the facts stand in the way of a good story. Yeah. We're going to end on that note. Great. And so Books and Spirits, the site for that is booksandspirits.com. You got it. Okay. So booksandspirits.com and the hawaiiproject.com. Thank you so much for coming on to share the background of that. Yeah. Good fun. Thank you. You're watching Think Tech Hawaii, Hawaii's leading digital media platform for civic engagement, raising public awareness on tech, energy, diversification, and globalism. Great content for Hawaii from Think Tech.