The Future Of Publishing Blog by Thad McIlroy
August 30th, 2010
…I’ll believe that the printed book is dead. When they stop printing a thousand dollar 20-volume dictionary, wisdom prevails. If you’re a cheapskate, you can buy the miniature version for five cents less than $400, and they’ll toss in the magnifying glass! Making the rounds of the blogosphere, Twittersphere and ignoramosphere today is the inaccurate…
July 23rd, 2010
I’ve known about the excellent Project Gutenberg for a long time now. It was founded in 1971 by Michael Hart and is the oldest digital library. I hadn’t been back to the site for several years because in my mind it was still the place where all you could download was ASCII text versions of…
July 5th, 2010
I uncover some unusual sites and blogs because I have a Google Alert for “future of publishing.” I can’t imagine I would have found it otherwise. Andrew Shaffer is the author of the forthcoming Harper Perennial Paperback Original Great Philosophers Who Failed at Love, to be published January 4, 2011. (Unusual exactitude for a big…
June 10th, 2010
This blog entry was prompted by a contemporary cartoon strip about book burning. It’s by Randall Munroe of xkcd.com (via Kate Eltham’s Electric Alphabet blog). This led me down a long road of inquiry, first into the history of book burning, then over to Ray Bradbury’s wonderful 1953 novel Fahrenheit 451. Although most associate book burning historically…
May 14th, 2010
My friend Bob McArthur recently wrote to me, “Am nearing the end of Chris Hedges Empire of Illusion…a dark and angry book about the rotting from within of North American culture.” Later he sent an excerpt, which itself contained an excerpt from Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show…