The Future Of Publishing Blog by Thad McIlroy
January 15th, 2013
I’ve been working with Michael McGill, a smart student from Pace University’s Masters of Publishing program. Mike has been spending a lot of time researching and documenting a truly tough challenge: the ROI from developing and maintaining metadata for books. Mike presented his report to attendees at the 2013 Digital Book World Conference in New…
December 22nd, 2012
I feel like I’m coming in from the Web wilderness as I start viewing John Branch’s, Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek on the New York Times site. Snow blows across a mountain peak as the saga of an deadly avalanche begins to spill down the page: “Avalanche! Elyse!” 650 words later and the reader has…
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.