The Future Of Publishing Blog by Thad McIlroy
June 1st, 2014
Indigo Books and Music reported its 4th quarter and annual sales last week. A few of the news stories reached for an alarmist tone. Canada’s Financial Post headlined its account with “Indigo annual revenue falls for third consecutive year.” Publishers Weekly went for the more startling “Indigo Has Big Fiscal 2014 Loss.”
May 19th, 2014
Here’s BBC’s version of tonight’s news story about Google’s proposed $1 billion acquisition of Twitch; you can find many more stories of equally pricey deals during the last few years. (Amazon ended up buying Twitch in August 2014 for $970 million). There’s no point in pontificating about a new Internet bubble. The maneuvering of high…
April 26th, 2014
My favorite news story last week concerns a lawsuit that has somehow reached the U.S. Supreme Court on the issue of how much pomegranate juice needs to be in a bottle before you can call it “pomegranate juice.” Remarkably, Coca-Cola, through its Minute Maid brand, sells a juice called “Pomegranate Blueberry” which contains just 0.3…
March 21st, 2014
You have to feel it was all a waste of time, this notion that somehow writing and publishing were being “reinvented” by new ideas and approaches and the startup companies behind them. Or even that being an independent publisher of any sort is worth the back-breaking effort.
March 12th, 2014
Everyone takes a shot at Amazon, and it’s not difficult to see why. Founder/CEO Jeff Bezos is blamed for just about every corporate crime imaginable, from pricing that destroys competition to suffocating warehouse employees on hot summer days (apparently no longer a problem). My criticism of Amazon is about an issue perhaps more subtle, but,…