The Future Of Publishing Blog by Thad McIlroy
March 12th, 2014
Everyone takes a shot at Amazon, and it’s not difficult to see why. Founder/CEO Jeff Bezos is blamed for just about every corporate crime imaginable, from pricing that destroys competition to suffocating warehouse employees on hot summer days (apparently no longer a problem). My criticism of Amazon is about an issue perhaps more subtle, but,…
October 23rd, 2013
Like most tech-dominated industries publishing is addicted to change. This addiction even has a scientific name: neophilia, in contrast with neophobia, a condition more traditionally associated with publishing (I chuckled when I read in the Wikipedia entry: “Neophobia is a common finding in aging animals…”).
September 2nd, 2012
Finn Harvor, a Canadian writer and artist living in South Korea, publishes a blog called Conversations in the Book Trade. He’s interviewed Rolf Maurer, publisher of New Star Books, noted journalist Ian Brown, Richard Nash from his Soft Skull days, provocateur Edward Champion and numerous others. Harvor asks each interviewee mostly the same questions and so I found…
November 9th, 2011
2. Technology will never be the obstacle. Wow. The new Lytro camera. It allows the user to chose after-the-fact what part of the picture they want the focus fixed on. And I was certain that image focus would always be a challenge. But one of the laws I’ve learned is that just when you think…
August 8th, 2011
I’ve tried to distill my 30 years of publishing technology into some guidelines, modestly named The Laws of the Future of Publishing. I’ve got 31 of them so far. People have asked that I fill in some detail beyond the terse statements. That’s going to keep me busy for awhile. Here’s the first.