Hugh McGuire on the future of book publishing

Hugh McGuire has been building tools and communities to bring books onto the open web since about 2005. He's the founder of LibriVox.org (free public domain audiobooks, made by volunteers from around the world), Pressbooks (an open source book publishing platform built on WordPress).  He's also Executive Director of the Rebus Foundation, a non-profit that is building the infrastructure to support books on the open web, by: building a new collaborative model for creating and publishing Open Educational Resources (OER), and building an open platform for scholarly reading. He lives and works in Montreal.

Hugh is the co-editor, with Brian O’Leary, of Book: A Futurist’s Manifesto — Essays from the bleeding edge of publishing (O’Reilly) and has talked about the future of publishing around the world, his work has appeared in various places in print, bits and audio, including: the New York Times, Forbes, the LA Times, BBC Radio, the New Yorker, CBC Radio, NPR, Techcrunch, Pando Daily and now, The Biblio File.

We talk here about LibriVox's free audio books representing the ideas of the early internet, collaborative communities, bringing the book  onto the internet and doing more than just selling them, PressBooks open source software, open textbooks in higher ed, new models of publishing, the Rebus Foundation rebuilding a new open publishing ecosystem, web-based collaboration, open reading platforms, academic publishing, the cost of textbooks skyrocketing, open textbook publishing, the Internet Archive, Brewster Kale, making all the world's information available for free, the value of low-cost education, crappy current literary fiction, eliminating online distractions and replacing Facebook and Twitter.