Thad McIlroy

The Future of Publishing

Blog by Thad McIlroy

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March 24th, 2026

Shy Girl: The Background to the New York Times Story

Here’s an account of the background to the New York Times report on Mia Ballard’s “Shy Girl,” and of my involvement in the saga. I brought the “scoop” to the Times, and worked with them to develop it, although the published article obscures my involvement. The Times landed a big story, republished and remarked on…

March 12th, 2026

What if none of this matters?

I’m just back to my hotel after three days at the London Book Fair, the 55-year-old annual publishing rights trading event, feeling a little melancholy. The fair is mainly a schmoozefest. Colleagues old and new. This year’s slogan was “defining the future of creative content,” although I found no new definitions. People assumed you were…

November 12th, 2025

Licensing for AI: What Should Book Publishers & Authors Do?

This is a 4,000+ word blog post. It can take 20 minutes to read, aka, an eternity. I apologize. I’ve been working on AI licensing issues for over a year now, and I wanted to share some of what I’ve learned. Here are the topics I’ll cover: Licensing for AI: Understanding the landscape and the…

November 5th, 2025

Book Publishing & Technology: The ONIX 3 Debacle

Beware: This post talks about metadata for books, and it talks about ONIX, the data format used to convey metadata for the retailing of books. But it is also about technology in the age of AI. It would be impossible to recap the whole story of metadata for books here, except in the clumsiest of…

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