Jeb Bush to write e-book and release 250,000 e-mails

Jeb Bush (Getty Images)

As he prepares for a possible 2016 presidential campaign, Jeb Bush said Saturday that he is writing an e-book and plans to release roughly 250,000 e-mails from his tenure as governor of Florida.

Bush, who has been taking steps to prepare for what some of his associates see as a likely presidential campaign, told a Florida television station that he would publish the book and release the e-mails "early next year."

"It's been kind of fun to go back and to think about this and remind myself that if you run with big ideas and then you're true to those ideas and get a chance to serve and implement them and do it with passion and conviction, you can move the needle, and that's what we need right now in America," Bush said in a Saturday interview with WPLG-TV, the ABC affiliate in Miami.

"BHAGs," Bush added (using an acronym for  "Big Hairy Audacious Goals.") "We need a few."

Bush said he was releasing the e-mails from his two terms in office, between 1999 and 2007, because he wanted to be transparent.

"Part of serving or running, both of them, is transparency, to be totally transparent," he said. "So I'll let people make up their mind. There's some funny ones, there's some sad ones, there's some serious ones."

Joking about his use of e-mail, Bush said: "I was digital before digital was cool, I guess. Now it's like, commonplace."

As governor, Bush was known to be a prolific e-mailer. In his official portrait, he posed with his Blackberry smartphone displayed prominently atop his bookshelf, next to a photo of his family.