Interview at Allentrepreneur

Allentrepreneur has just posted an interview with moi:

Allentrepreneur: Welcome to Allentrepreneur Hugh and thanks for taking the time to talk. You’ve got quite a start-up resume to your name. LibriVox.org, earideas.com, datalibre.ca and your latest one, The Book Oven, which has me particularly curious since I’m a book junkie. Could you give us an introduction?

Hugh: The book business is going through massive changes, there are cutbacks all over the place in publishing houses, bricks and mortar booksellers are in trouble, and there’s angst everywhere about how digital and ebooks will upset business models that have been entrenched for 100 years. But books are still a $50 billion business, and there are passionate readers and writers all over the world. The book business looks a lot like the music business did 10 years ago, with these huge companies knowing things are going to change, but having great trouble adjusting.

One really exciting thing is new technologies that make publishing a book cheap and easy: print-on-demand and ebooks. In some sense these technologies can take the publisher out of the picture – in the same way that musicians can now make and distribute their music online, writers now have the same abilities.

But making a book is an arduous and collaborative process. Book Oven will help bridge the gap between writing, and publishing a finished product. [more…]