Hugh McGuire on the future of book publishing
b'
Hugh McGuire has\\xa0been building tools and communities to\\xa0bring\\xa0books onto the open web since about 2005.\\xa0He\'s the founder of\\xa0LibriVox.org\\xa0(free public domain audiobooks, made by volunteers from around the world),\\xa0Pressbooks\\xa0(an open source book publishing platform built on WordPress).\\xa0 He\'s also Executive Director of the\\xa0Rebus 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\\u2019Leary, of\\xa0Book: A Futurist\\u2019s Manifesto\\xa0\\u2014 Essays from the bleeding edge of publishing (O\\u2019Reilly) and has\\xa0talked 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\\xa0 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.\\xa0
'