The Digitizers: Hugh McGuire of Book Oven

By Kat Meyer

Hugh McGuire, co-founder of Book Oven, is Kat Meyer’s latest interviewee in her Digitizers series. Book Oven is a Web space for making, collaborating on, and selling books. Hugh is also the founder of LibriVox.org, an all-volunteer project that creates free public domain audiobooks, now the most prolific audiobook publisher in the world, and several other Webby projects. McGuire photo by C.C. Chapman.

KM: For those readers who don’t know about it yet, can you give us the elevator speech version of what Book Oven is, and what it does?

HM: We’re calling it "cloud-publishing," an online space to create, collaborate on, and sell books and e-books.

Most of these tools exist, of course, in various forms already. You can collaborate with editors and proofreaders on a wiki or Google Docs, you can find other writers or editors on various writers’ forums. You can generate an ePub ebook using various tools, and you can make a PDF and send it to Lulu, or CreateSpace, and sell your book print-on-demand through your own site, or through online book retailers; you can sell your e-books on Smashwords, or Amazon’s Kindle store, or at Shortcovers.

But, we want to put all that together so that writers, editors, and designers can focus on the really important stuff: the content. So we’re building a set of Web tools, and a community, that will allow writers, editors, proofreaders and designers to work on a book, and get it into the hands (or devices) of readers.

How people organize themselves in Book Oven is up to them: small private groups of colleagues; open groups of strangers; people who work together out of interest in a particular book or topic, or people who find each other through a marketplace for services.

We’re just getting started, and we’ve built the basics of this platform. But as we move forward, we really need feedback from writers and editors and proofreaders and designers about what an ideal working space would look like, dedicated to making books.

We’re lucky in that we come at this entirely from the view of the Web. I’ve been working for a long time on LibriVox.org, an open model for audiobook publishing that’s been a great success. My partner-in-crime and Book Oven co-founder, Stephanie Troeth, has been building big Web sites for more than a decade, and is deeply involved in the global Web standards communities. So we’re looking at the problem of book publishing entirely from the perspective of people of the Web, which means we see very different things than traditional publishers do. But our team is made up of readers, and writers—we love books, words, literature, writing, libraries—all that good stuff—and so this is an exciting project to work on. We get to re-imagine what bookmaking will look like as the world becomes more connected, which is I think one of the most fascinating problems to be wrestling with.

Hmm. Let’s just imagine that was a really long elevator ride!

KM: Where did the idea for Book Oven come from? Was it a natural outgrowth of your work with Librivox, or was it sparked by some other event?

HM: When I "rediscovered" the Web in 2004 (I mean, when I started participating in creation on the Web, rather than just consuming), I was absolutely giddy with two things:

• The free software/open source movement.
• Free tools for making media, and distributing it to the world.

The free software movement provided this fascinating study in a new model for organizing groups of people around complex problems, and solving them, with the initial capital investment taken out of the equation. It’s not that money was irrelevant, but that groups of people who wanted to solve particular problems suddenly had the means—especially as the web became more accessible – to self-organize to get the stuff done. What was so thrilling to me about this model is that it was so successful in making great stuff: Linux, Firefox, WordPress, etc. And more, it meant that the tools to make things were floating around all over the web, and you could use bits of one tool, or another and put them together to build something you needed.

I was very curious about how that could be applied to problems other than software.

The other parts of the equation were the tools for making and distributing media: blogging, podcasting, YouTube etc. I’ve always felt that creation is the most rewarding act someone can engage in, even more so if that creation can be shared with the world. LibriVox took those ideas, and tools and applied them to the creation of free public domain audiobooks. At some point I realized that what we had really done was build an audiobook publishing "company" (totally non-profit, of course), that had flourished and produced this amazing body of work, because we had made it easy for people to do something they wanted to do: create audiobooks, and share them with the world. We were, I realized, a publishing "company" whose true "clients" were the producers of audiobooks, and by focusing our attention on them, we’d seen a wonderful flourishing of content that never would have been available otherwise. But we didn’t do anything very fancy, we just pulled existing tools together, and built a community around a specific purpose: making public domain audiobooks. The results were, really, pretty astounding.

I’ve always loved books, and writing, and fiction. At one point I wrote a novel, and when I was trying to get it published, I was amazed at the publishing industry: it was byzantine and opaque, and hard to figure out. And everything seemed set up to make things difficult. Of course there are reasons for that: agents and publishers get flooded with manuscripts, and by one study anyway, there are more aspiring book writers in the US than there are readers of books. But of course the web has shown that when there is demand for something— in this case, getting your book published— it will find a way to flow around all the blockages.

The tools are there already: you can publish your books on Lulu or elsewhere, and companies like Smashwords make it easy to publish and sell you e-books. But these solutions looked to me much like the public domain audiobook problem before LibriVox. The tools existed, but someone needed to bring together a community, and make those tools easier to use in order for a real public domain audiobook publishing model to emerge. And, in the case of books, the real problem is not so much publishing a book—anyone can do that— but publishing a good book. Publishing the best book you can. That takes time, and input from others—editors and proofreaders and the like.

With Book Oven, we are building a place for that kind of collaboration to happen, and then an easy way to convert the final product into an e-book or book-book, and sell it on the web. And that’s an important distinction between LibriVox and Book Oven: while LibriVox is explicitly a non-commercial project that produces free audiobooks, at Book Oven, the decisions about how work on a book gets organized, and what happens afterward is up to the writer, or whoever “owns” the project. There is nothing explicitly non-commercial about Book Oven, and we expect to see lots of commercial activity around the books produced there.

We want to make it easy to make, and sell books—and so we see this a new model for publishing of all kinds.

KM: BookOven is your second (that I know of) project that is relies heavily upon crowdsourcing. What draws you to community collaboration projects? What do you love most about the model, and are there any drawbacks?

HM: First, I really don’t like the term "crowdsourcing." I don’t think it’s reflective of the most interesting kinds of collaboration on the web. My real interest is in how the Web has enabled groups of people to work together in new ways to solve complex problems. Crowdsourcing has this really strange connotation—basically of "cheap labour"—which isn’t interesting to me at all. Yochai Benkler uses the term "commons-based peer production," which is closer maybe. Projects like Wikipedia you might call "mass collaboration." But that doesn’t really hit my real interest either.

If you look at LibriVox, it’s actually a very structured kind of collaboration. The output is fixed (a faithful rendition of a text in audio), and a small group of people—readers, coordinators, prooflisteners, and catalogers—decide to work together in a very specific way in order to make an audiobook happen. This kind of collaboration was impossible before the Web, which is why it’s exciting. But LibriVox isn’t crowdsourcing, and it’s not really mass collaboration either. Commons-based peer production? Maybe.

The key is the way the Web enables groups of people to work together in new ways. They might be strangers, might know each other, might be aligned with commercial interest, or might just feel like working on something together because it interests them; that’s what’s exciting. Innovation comes when you get rid of friction points that prevent people from working together, and find ways to make sure that there are incentives (monetary, reputational, artistic, social etc) for people to work together.

Book Oven is going to be a different kind of challenge than LibriVox. With LibriVox there was very much a "do good for the world" incentive among the participants (although there are many other reasons people participate in LibriVox). With Book Oven we need to allow for a wider range of incentives—personal, artistic, financial, and more. We need to build a kind of space where there is both a sense of greater purpose (building a new, more flexible publishing model), and clear reasons why writers and editors and proofreaders and designers might want to join. Some reasons might be: to work on books people wouldn’t get to work on professionally; because they get a financial stake in the sales of the book; for straight fees; out of interest in a topic; or to support other writers, friends, colleagues. So again, calling it "crowdsourcing" doesn’t really do justice to what we expect to see in Book Oven.

After all that rambling, I should admit that Bite-Size Edits, our proofreading game/tool is closer to "crowdsourcing." Or can be anyway. It works like this:

• You upload a text.
• Your text gets chopped up into sentences.
• Those sentences get served at random to proofreaders (though you retain control over what edits get accepted/modified/rejected; you also can control who those proofreaders are).
• Once all the sentences have been edited, the system reassembles your text in the right order.

And you can use Bite-Size as a true, er, crowdsourcing tool, allowing the masses to edit your text; or you can use it with a small group of private editors, or just yourself.

KM: Is Book Oven set up to create any sort of hierarchy as one would find in the traditional publishing house (e.g.: Senior editors, editors-in-chief, etc.)? In other words, who gets final say on edits and other components of the book?

HM: Book Oven is about giving groups of people the tools to collaborate on the creation, and publishing of a book. How those groups organize themselves will be entirely up to them. Some *might* organize as truly open crowdsourcing book projects. Many will not, and there will be a writer, editor, proofreader, designer—just as there is in a publishing house. But, I hope that we’ll also see small presses using Book Oven— because it’s an easier, more structured tool set to make a book in the digital age. In fact, I’d like to see many new kinds of small presses and collectives evolving using tools like Book Oven, with all sorts of different structures.

In short, we’re totally agnostic about how people organize themselves around books in Book Oven. We just want lots of people to make (and sell!) lots of great books.

KM: When a Book Oven book is completed, is it available for sale? In what formats?

HM: We’re not quite there yet, but eventually we’ll have a Book Oven store where you can sell your books, and we’ll plug in with other online retailers (say, Smashwords, Amazon, Shortcovers etc), so you can easily sell your books there too. We’re also agnostic about formats, we’ll get them into whatever formats we can: e-book, Web/HTML, and print-on-demand. Right now you can produce ePubs, unformatted PDF, and html. But again, we’re totally agnostic about it, and would like to support whatever formats people want to read in.

KM: Book Oven is currently open to the public – anyone can upload content and make it available to others to edit and proofread. What kind of revenue model do you anticipate? Will you be selling the completed books? If so, how is the profit shared (do those who have worked on editing/proofing the book get any of the profit)?

HM: The main part of our revenues come from taking a small cut of books sold, though we have a few other revenue hooks as well. We have not fixed our pricing yet, but I will say that I’m … surprised … by the profit splits offered by a certain unnamed online book retail giant for e-books. I am a big fan of Smashwords and their pricing scheme, (15% to Smashwords, 85% to author/publisher). It makes much more sense to me.

Book Oven will only be successful if bookmakers are happy, and the more money we can put in their pockets, the better for everyone.

As for how in-project revenue sharing will happen, we’re not there yet. But I would imagine there will be a few models including assigning a % of profits to your project team. That will have to evolve with the desires of community however; and there are slightly scary tax and accounting implications to be worked through as well.

KM: What other possibilities do you see for Book Oven? Will you be offering enterprise versions for traditional/for-profit publishers?

HM: I think in the next couple of years, we’re more likely to be useful for the odd "maverick editor" than we are to sell enterprise versions of Book Oven to Random House and HarperCollins.

We do expect smaller presses to be interested in using our tools, though, and eventually we’d like to offer customized versions to publishers. But that, too, is away down the line.

KM: What do you like to read, and how?

HM: I’m a literary fiction kind of guy. Lately I’ve been reading big, old, public domain books on my iphone (using Stanza). If you can believe it, I read War and Peace and Moby Dick that way, and I’m currently reading The Good Soldier, by Ford Madox Ford (what a wonderful book that is, by the way). I also have stacks of book books all over the place, and for modern writers I like (somewhat at random): John Banville, Miriam Toews, Murakami, Nabokov, Jeanette Winterson, Pynchon, Nicholson Baker, Gunter Grass, Toni Morrison … and on and on.

I should say I am voracious Web reader—of all sorts of things, most recently I’ve been ingesting great quantities of book blogs, and writings about the collapse of media as we knew it. Oh, I read the odd Twitter post too.

A little more on Hugh: He co-founded Book Oven with Stephanie Troeth. In addition, he writes for the Huffington Post about digital media and publishing, is on the Advisory Board of the Conversations Network, and is Past-President of the Board of Directors of the Atwater Library, Canada’s last remaining Mechanic’s Institute. He lives in Montreal, and writes frequently on the Book Oven Blog and less frequently on his own site.