The Future Of Publishing Blog by Thad McIlroy
August 11th, 2008
An hilarious short imagined monologue by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos appears on the McSweeney site. Written by Evan Johnston under the title “Jeff Bezos Says Hi to You in the Waiting Room of Your Doctors’ Office,” Bezos confesses that the inspiration for the Kindle began in his childhood: “As a small child, I loved books, and…
August 8th, 2008
Most folks who are following publishing today ignore how far the revolution is spreading. The challenge facing (mostly North American) newspapers grabs the headlines, magazine publishing produces a tear or two, while book publishing is embattled merely by those silly eBooks, that may one day change the landscape of publishing, but in the meantime are…
July 26th, 2008
A surprisingly strong article appears in tomorrow’s New York Times (July 27, 2008) that tackles the ongoing and vexing issue of whether the increasing hours spent by youngsters on the Web, often at the expense of reading books and other sustained verbal constructions, is turning them into babbling drones, or whether it’s possible that new…
June 27th, 2008
In February of this year the O’Reilly fiefdom held its second “Tools of Change for Publishers” conference in New York City. Though the title of the conference suggests that it was not limited to book publishers, books were indeed the focus. Details from the conference have been slow to emerge in cogent form. Steve Paxhia,…
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…