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…
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 25th, 2008
According to a press release on Amazon.com’s Web site today, the online seller announced the acquisition of Fabric.com, a leading online fabric store that offers custom measured and cut fabrics, as well as patterns, sewing tools and accessories. This acquisition will enable “Fabric.com to further expand its selection of fabrics and accessories while enabling Amazon.com to offer its customers…
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…