This morning, I interviewed Hugh McGuire. Hugh has a long history at the crossroads of book culture and technology. He founded Librivox, a volunteer-based service, which takes public domain books and turns them into audiobooks. He’s also co-founder of Book Oven, a new start-up that aims to be a collaborative space for making books. He’s also one of the people behind BookCamp, an unconference held in Toronto on June 6th. Hugh came into CBC’s Montreal studios to talk about the future of publishing, and the buzz at BookCamp.
A shorter version of this interview will air on the June 10th and 13th episode of Spark, but you can hear the full, uncut interview below, or download the MP3.
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Original Image by Marko Kulik
"Books are machines to think with." R.I. Richards (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I._A._Richards)
Ah, great. Thanks!
Nice interview. I'm glad to see that BookCamp covered a range of topics and did not just focus on the delivery technology. After all, we don't want to lose sight of the fact that what really matters with books is what's in them. Kudos to Hugh and BookCamp for taking the wide-angle view.
This is perhaps my favourite interview, although there's a certain amount of bias involved, since I am crazily passionate about books. Hugh McGuire's very articulate in his explanation of what the digital world has to offer for publishing and the challenges we're going to face. I really enjoyed the questions you asked him as well, Nora.
I can't emphasize enough the point that Hugh made about digital books and paper books being able to coexist. Maybe it's our natural competitive spirit, but we tend to create false dichotomies where there should be none. I got a huge box of books in the mail today from Chapters. I love getting books in the mail; I love holding paper books, smelling them, watching them wear with age and use. Maybe one day they'll come out with a Kindle that can dog-ear! At the same time, I love digital books for their convenience and the possibility that technology brings to the way we read. That being said, I'm holding out on purchasing any sort of e-reader until the technology improves somewhat.
So again, thanks for the interview! This is a textbook reason why people should subscribe to Spark Plus.
I love to read books online allot and I also like to go to a library and look for the books I actually like to read. I more read the online books cuz is harder to finish reading them. I finish a paper book in 1-2 days, the electronic edition's takes me like 3-4days. Hugh made allot for both digital and paper edition's. He is a leader.