The Future Of Publishing Blog by Thad McIlroy
January 10th, 2012
Cultures die symbolically. Canadian culture took a major hit on Monday with the sale of Canada’s most important book publisher, McClelland & Stewart. Canada’s largest university, the University of Toronto, took a gift horse and sold it to the Bertelsmann AG, the fifth-largest book publisher in the world, via its proxy, Random House of Canada.
January 10th, 2012
…or so said the article announcing Walrus TV.
January 4th, 2012
How I wish that were a compliment. It likely would have been in 2004 when Best Buy was named “Company of the Year” by Forbes. Today it’s an insult. Or a threat. Or a doom-filled prediction.
December 31st, 2011
Robotics is advancing by leaps and bounds, in no small part because of the superb FIRST robotics competition launched by Dean Kamen in 1989. A new development with value to the future of publishing is Boxie, the Story-Gathering Robot, invented by Alexander Reben at the renowned M.I.T. Media Lab. Boxie is a robotic journalist; it could handle those “man on…
December 7th, 2011
The Book Industry Study Group (BISG) today published its new policy for best practices in assigning ISBNs to digital products, aka ebooks. With endorsement from BookNet Canada, the National Information Standards Organization (NISO), and IBPA, the Independent Book Publishers Association, it’s therefore applicable across North America (“but could be applied elsewhere as well”).