June 4th, 2008
Every four years in Dusseldorf, Germany an enormous printing trade show, called drupa (standing for Druck Und Papier [in German: printing and paper] gets underway. According to the official press release, “With 1,971 exhibitors from 52 countries spread across an exhibition area of over 175,000 square metres and an anticipated 400,000 visitors from around the globe,…
June 1st, 2008
More credit where credit is due: I was alerted to this provocative May 2008 column on Slate.com by Bob Sacks in his Heard on the Web — Media Intelligence newsletter. Back in the prehistoric era, i.e. 1993, mega-bestselling author Michael Crichton wrote an article for Wired magazine called Mediasaurus. In the article he made several…
May 30th, 2008
Credit where credit is due: I was first informed of this fascinating tale about the future of writing and book publishing from David Pogue’s always fun, provocative and illuminating weekly column in The New York Times. His May 22nd column provided his take on whether he should provide free downloads of his (many) books. After a couple of bad…
May 29th, 2008
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
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…