The Leanpub Podcast

In this special episode of the Leanpub Frontmatter podcast, Leanpub co-founder Len Epp interviews Don Tapscott, Chancellor of Trent University, for the Chancellor's Lecture series.

The interview was recorded before a live audience on November 16, 2018.

Don Tapscott is one of the leading authorities in the world on the way technology can impact business and society. He has been writing prescient books on technology and economics since the dawn of the age of personal computing, including the first bestselling book on the impact the internet might have on business, The Digital Economy: Promise and Peril in the Age of Networked Intelligence.

Don has published many other books since then, including Growing Up Digital and Wikinomics, and in 2015 Don published a new version of The Digital Economy. It's a fascinating project, where Don republished all the original chapters of the book, along with commentary from twenty years later.

In recent years, in partnership with his son Alex, Don co-founded The Blockchain Research Institute, which is doing groundbreaking work on the impact that blockchain technology might have on all aspects of the way we live our lives and organize ourselves in the modern digital world.

In 2016, Don and Alex published the first major bestselling book on blockchain technology, Blockchain Revolution, and in June of this year, they published a new paperback edition of of the book, with a substantial new preface and a straightforwardly political afterword called "A New Social Contract for the Digital Age," which, along with Don's paper "A Declaration of Interdependence: Toward a New Social Contract for the Digital Economy", forms the basis of this interview.

The full audio for the interview is here. You can subscribe to the Frontmatter podcast in iTunes or add the podcast URL directly.

This interview has been edited for conciseness and clarity.

Zsolt Nagy is the author of the Leanpub book The Charismatic Coder: The Software Developer's Guide to Social Confidence and Emotional Freedom.

In this interview, Leanpub co-founder Len Epp talks with Zsolt about his background, growing up in Hungary, Jordan Peterson and the importance of the "gotcha moment," online poker and AI, professional development tactics like how to ask for a raise, the relationship between genuine productivity and productivity tools and processes, and at the end they talk a little bit about his experience as a self-published author.

This interview was recorded on October 16, 2018.

The full audio for the interview is here. You can subscribe to the Frontmatter podcast in iTunes or add the podcast URL directly.

This interview has been edited for conciseness and clarity.

Bill Kasdorf is a partner at the consultancy Publishing Technology Partners, where he provides guidance and insight regarding the publishing industry. He has worked with many well-known companies and institutions, from the scholarly press at Harvard, to the World Bank and the British Library, amongst many others.

In this interview, Leanpub co-founder Len Epp talks with Bill about his background and how he got interested in the world of books, the importance of standards and interoperability when it comes to accessibility, how standardization fuels innovation, changes to the publishing industry in the past decades, from scholarly to trade publishing, and how the EPUB format is managed, and other topics.

This interview was recorded on September 18, 2018.

The full audio for the interview is here. You can subscribe to the Backmatter podcast in iTunes or add the podcast URL directly.

This interview has been edited for conciseness and clarity.

Chris Fidao is the author of the Leanpub book Servers for Hackers: Server Administration for Programmers. In this interview, Leanpub co-founder Len Epp talks with Chris about his background, how he got into programming, his entry into the world of books and screencasts and independently creating "info products," and at the end, they talk a little bit about his experience as a self-published author.

This interview was recorded on September 12, 2018.

The full audio for the interview is here. You can subscribe to the Frontmatter podcast in iTunes or add the podcast URL directly.

This interview has been edited for conciseness and clarity.

Sam Halliday is the author of the Leanpub book Functional Programming for Mortals with Scalaz. In this Q&A, which was conducted over email, Leanpub co-founder Len Epp talks with Sam about his background, his work, an amazing project to create educational materials in South Africa, the truth about what he thinks about open source, his book, and at the end, they talk a little bit about his experience as a self-published author.

The very brief audio of an introduction to the Q&A is here. You can subscribe to the Frontmatter podcast in iTunes or add the podcast URL directly.

Paul Redmond is the author of the Leanpub book Docker for PHP Developers: A guide to using Docker for PHP development. In this interview, Leanpub co-founder Len Epp talks with Paul about his background, his work for Laravel News and his Bitpress project, his process for writing books, what it's like having a self-published book picked up by a conventional publisher, his book, and at the end, they talk a little bit about his experience as a self-published author.

This interview was recorded on August 28, 2018.

The full audio for the interview is here. You can subscribe to the Frontmatter podcast in iTunes or add the podcast URL directly.

This interview has been edited for conciseness and clarity. Conversational quotations of third parties should be treated as paraphrases and not be used for attribution.

W. Jason Gilmore is the author of the Leanpub book Easy Laravel 5: A Hands On Introduction Using a Real-World Project. In this interview, Leanpub co-founder Len Epp talks with Jason about some of his favorite projects from the past few years, including the creation of a system for predicting what books a publisher should be publishing, and a couple of really cool services built using the Laravel PHP framework, Jason's latest job as the CTO of DreamFactory, and finally they discuss the most recent update to Easy Laravel 5.

This interview was recorded on August 27, 2018.

The full audio for the interview is here. You can subscribe to the Frontmatter podcast in iTunes or add the podcast URL directly.

This interview has been edited for conciseness and clarity.

Kristine Kathryn Rusch is a bestselling and award-winning author who also writes a very popular blog on the business side of book publishing, which is an invaluable resource for authors in all genres.

In this interview, Leanpub co-founder Len Epp talks with Kristine about her background as a writer, journalism and politics in the US, the impact of war on the mail-order book business in the US in the early 1990s, the recent scandal involving alleged theft of revenue at a prominent New York-based agency, why Kris doesn't chase online bookstore algorithms, and a number of issues facing authors of all kinds, including those who are self-published and those who are published conventionally.

This interview was recorded on August 16, 2018.

Taylor Otwell is the creator and maintainer of the popular Laravel PHP framework and the author of the Leanpub book Laravel: From Apprentice To Artisan.

In this interview, Leanpub co-founder Len Epp talks with Taylor about changes to Laravel and developments in the Laravel community since their original interview nearly five years ago, in September 2013. They also discuss Taylor's unique and successful approach to using Patreon, and the importance of working on the hard things first in new software projects, amongst other things, including Star Trek.

This interview was recorded on August 24, 2018.

The full audio for the interview is here. You can subscribe to the Frontmatter podcast in iTunes or add the podcast URL directly.

This interview has been edited for conciseness and clarity.

Mark Graban is the author of the Leanpub book Measures of Success: React Less, Lead Better, Improve More. In this interview, Leanpub co-founder Len Epp talks with Mark about how he has widened the scope of his work from healthcare to large organizations generally, how a bad system can lead good people to do bad things, how to view a chart as "the voice of a process," overreacting to data, his book, and at the end, they talk a little bit about his experience as a self-published author.

This interview was recorded on August 10, 2018.

The full audio for the interview is here. You can subscribe to the Frontmatter podcast in iTunes or add the podcast URL directly.

This interview has been edited for conciseness and clarity.