The Future Of Publishing Blog by Thad McIlroy
December 13th, 2012
I’m participating in a live chat on The Guardian tomorrow, Universities in 2012. As The Guardian phrases it, the past 12 months have indeed been heady. For me it’s the most important year in higher education since I began following the “industry” two decades ago. I think the developments we’ve followed this year — MOOCs, enhanced digital textbooks,…
November 30th, 2012
Let’s keep it simple in this posting. On May 11, 2007 The Thomson Corporation announced that it had sold its Thomson Learning division to two private equity groups. The company was soon renamed Cengage Learning. The last year that Thomson reported sales for Thomson Learning was fiscal year 2005. Here’s the report:
October 28th, 2012
XML will be celebrating its official 15th anniversary on February 10, 2013. By many measures it has been a huge success. There are thousands of XML dialects used across a vast swath of the sciences, in business and in ecommerce. By the measure of the book publishing community it’s been less than a huge success.
October 18th, 2012
The big book publishing news this week is that Barnes & Noble’s boycott of Amazon publishing titles is proving effective and hitting authors and publishers where it hurts the most: hardcover sales of big new titles.
September 20th, 2012
When I began researching The Metadata Handbook I believed that metadata was magic. I believed that if you could add rich and accurate metadata to a title listing you’d all but guarantee big sales. I’ve since learned that while metadata is enchanting, its powers are far more down to earth.