Tracey Lauriault (my co-founder of datalibre.ca, and the tireless editor of) and I have a chapter in a just-released book out of the University of Sydney Press: Access to Public Sector Information : Law, Technology and Policy, edited by Brian Fitzgerald. Ours is chapter 14 in Volume 1: “Data Access in Canada: civicaccess.ca.” Access to [...]
On August 10, 2005 I put up a website, called it LibriVox, and posted the following: LibriVox is a hope, an experiment, and a question: can the net harness a bunch of volunteers to help bring books in the public domain to life through podcasting? LibriVox is an open source audio-literary attempt to harness the [...]
I gave a workshop at the annual YES Montreal Entrepreneurship Conference about social media & marketing. Here it is: Ten Thoughts on Social Media & Marketing View more presentations from Hugh McGuire. Here are my ten thoughts: 1. Marketing isn’t convincing people to buy your stuff. Marketing is making sure that the people who want [...]
I just sent this out to the world: the tentative schedule for BookCampToronto, May 15 (and for more detailed session info: here). Follow us on Twitter: @bookcampto Hashtag: #bcto2010 Web site: http://bookcampto.pbworks.com BOOKCAMPTORONTO: TENTATIVE SCHEDULE: ROOM ONE: 9:30 Launching a Digital Business from Inside a Print Business * Sulemaan Ahmed (Director of Digital Marketing, Harlequin) [...]
The only way I can read web sites these days is either using the Readability bookmarklet, or Instapaper. The rest of “web design” (mostly) strikes me as a distraction from what I want: the text. I’ve been meaning to update the theme on this blog for some time, along with sprucing up some of the [...]
A recent study done by Roger Bohn of UC San Diego, estimates that the average American consumes about 36,000 words of text per day, during leisure hours. That number includes print, email, the web, and text messaging. That’s a lot of text. At that rate the average American could read Moby Dick every week. The [...]
Il y’a une petite article dans L’Actualité (Sept 09) sur Book Oven et LibriVox: « Le numérique ne tuera pas l’édition traditionnelle, mais il va la changer », dit Hugh McGuire. Cet ancien ingénieur en mécanique âgé de 35 ans lançait en 2007 un autre collectif, Earideas, qui recense les balados (podcasts) de l’heure sur le [...]
Roberto Rocha of the Montreal Gazette has a good article about Book Oven and the new publishing landscape, with a nice pic out the window of the office (with me blocking the view, unfortunately): Before the Internet, when a writer could not find a publisher to print and sell a manuscript, he could take matters [...]
Today is LibriVox’s 4th birthday. LibriVox is a kooky kind of project with the following objective: To make all books in the public domain available, for free, in audio format on the internet. Some statistics, as of today: Total number of projects: 3113 Number of completed projects: 2556 Number of completed non-English projects: 364 Total [...]
Book Oven Open for Cooking We’ve been toiling away behind the scenes on the Book Oven for a few months. Now we’re ready to show you what we’ve been cooking. But there’s still work to do, and we want your help in building a new model for publishing. Are you a writer? An editor? A [...]