The Future Of Publishing Blog by Thad McIlroy
June 24th, 2008
If you’ve read the section on this site about eBooks and (what I call) eContent, you’ll know that I’m not a big cheerleader for eBooks. I lived through the first eBook “revolution” — featuring the forgotten standalone eBook readers like the Rocket eBook and the SoftBook Reader. That revolution never took off, and wound down…
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 20th, 2008
I’m thrilled to have received permission to post Heidi Julavits’ short piece of creative nonfiction, “The Writers in the Silos.” It projects the future of publishing as nothing has before. I first encountered it in the September 2007 issue of Harper’s Magazine, though it was a reprint from “Creative Nonfiction Issue #31: Imagining the Future,”…
April 25th, 2008
I bet you didn’t observe it with a special ceremony at your company (nor, privately, at home), but April 23rd was UNESCO’s annual World Book Day (coinciding with Shakespeare’s birthday). I learned about this on the website of German media giant Bertelsmann. With sales approaching $30 billion annually, it is easily one of the largest…
November 24th, 2007
My last blog entry referred to a groundbreaking report just issued by IBM on the future of advertising. Also issued this week was a long-awaited report from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), To Read or Not To Read, “the most complete and up-to-date report of the nation’s reading trends and — perhaps most…