The Future Of Publishing Blog by Thad McIlroy

Giving Away Digital Books for Free

May 29th, 2008

QuarkXPress 8 Announced

After leading the page layout sweepstakes for many years, QuarkXPress was slowly but surely falling behind Adobe InDesign in sales and functionality as the #1 page layout program (primarily for print). When Bruce Chisholm was at the helm at Adobe he championed the concept that Microsoft has used so effectively for years: bundle a bunch…

May 25th, 2008

The Financial Crisis: An Interview with George Soros

I am not an economist (thank God), but have always been fascinated and perplexed by sudden changes in the economy and their secondary effects. I’ve just updated my article on “Current Economics and the Future of Publishing,” using my admittedly limited knowledge to make some modest observations on how the current economic crisis in the…

May 20th, 2008

Is This the Future of Publishing?

I’m thrilled to have received permission to post Heidi Julavits’ short piece of creative nonfiction, “The Writers in the Silos.” It projects the future of publishing as nothing has before. I first encountered it in the September 2007 issue of Harper’s Magazine, though it was a reprint from “Creative Nonfiction Issue #31: Imagining the Future,”…

May 18th, 2008

Is the Internet Really Destroying Newspapers?

The Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ) is a superb research organization funded by the Pew Research Center in Washington, D.C. Its website is a rich treasure trove of research, analysis and commentary tackling the challenge of “understanding news in the digital age.” PEJ’s flagship report is its annual State of the News Media. The…