The Future Of Publishing Blog by Thad McIlroy
July 29th, 2026
(This blog post about AI is very long, nearly 6,000 words… but Google can summarize it for you!) There’s a new scholarly paper available, published July 22, 2026, titled “Generative AI floods and dilutes the market for books.” The authors are Tuhin Chakrabarty, Xinyue Liu, Jane C. Ginsburg, and Paramveer Dhillon. It might have remained…
August 19th, 2019
Last week the U.S. Census Bureau reported that U.S. bookstore sales dropped 5.1% in the first six months of 2019. I filed the report away — as I always do with industry sales reports — with the thought “up a little here, down a little there….” While a 5% shift is, by most measures, more than…
April 2nd, 2019
Updated March, 2024. In this third post of a three-part series (part 1 is here) (part 2 is here), I’ll focus directly on the book publishing industry and how the next recession could be felt. I hope that an analysis of the impact of past recessions might arm us for the next.
January 28th, 2019
In the first post of this 3-part series on the impact of recessions on publishing industries I took a broad look at the economic expansion since the recession of 2007, pondering when the next recession will pop. Part 1 Part 3 There’s a challenge in assessing the impact of economic events on the publishing and…
December 16th, 2018
Part 2 Part 3 The upside of predicting a downturn in the economy is that eventually you’ll be right. The downside is that while the party’s still in full swing you’re just the grouchy guy in the corner, scowling at the other guests.