The Future Of Publishing Blog by Thad McIlroy

Barnes & Noble Divides $300 Million in Half

September 18th, 2014

Newspapers and the Decline in the Use of Traveller’s Cheques

I’m thinking about two very different products each apparently well on the road to oblivion. Here’s a graph (roughly) illustrating the decline in the use of traveller’s cheques (aka “travelers checks” and several other spellings). There was tremendous growth through the mid-1990s. The drop-off is severe. Wikipedia details that “travelers cheques are no longer widely accepted…

August 5th, 2014

Bundling, Unbundling and Ebook Subscription Services

How to Succeed in Business by Bundling – and Unbundling is a thought-provoking interview with Marc Andreessen and Jim Barksdale online at the Harvard Business Review. Marc Andreessen was the co-founder of Netscape. Jim Barksdale is a veteran of IBM, FedEx and AT&T Wireless “brought on a few months after Netscape’s founding to provide adult supervision as its CEO.” Both are now…