The Future Of Publishing Blog by Thad McIlroy
July 11th, 2025
The best presentation about AI and book publishing that I’ve ever “seen” is Keith Riegert’s June presentation to the U.S. Book Show in New York. (The show was a great success!) Slide by slide, 90 slides in all, Keith paints a vivid picture of AI’s applicability to book publishing today, and its plausible future within…
July 26th, 2023
Yesterday Lagardère Publishing released its six-month financial data. Sales declined at Hachette Book Group by 8.6%. In its earnings release the company said that “operational efficiency plans, particularly in the United States,” mitigated some of the impact of revenue declines. In May, HarperCollins reported flat sales and profits declines, “driven by ongoing supply chain, inventory…
January 5th, 2021
When COVID-19 hit in early 2020, the press coverage was overwhelming. The trusted book publishing media, including Publishers Weekly, Publishing Perspectives, Publishers Lunch, The Bookseller in the U.K. and Quill & Quire in Canada, each did a fine job of monitoring developments within publishing and bookselling. Then, early in the pandemic, Amazon prioritized what it…
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.
July 11th, 2017
I do fret about the future of publishing. For all kinds of reasons. We’ve seen what happened to newspapers. And then the same thing happened to magazines (more or less). The future of periodical publishing in print is between challenging and bleak.