The Future Of Publishing Blog by Thad McIlroy

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April 28th, 2021

Publishing’s Problem is not a Tech Problem

Three different items “crossed my desk” this week that made me think more about the role of technology in the future of book publishing. They’re from different sources, but the messages converge. The first item was a March blog post by Benedict Evans. (His excellent free weekly newsletter is a ‘must-subscribe’; the paid version is…

January 27th, 2016

Digging Deeper into the Manifestos

“Reading comprehension,” Wikipedia tells us “is the ability to read text, process it and understand its meaning” (emphasis mine). I remember in Grade 5 at St. Anselm’s School when Mrs. Webber introduced our class to SRA cards, a ground-breaking reading comprehension game that help teach kids that reading wasn’t just mouthing the words and stringing the…

February 11th, 2011

Think Good Thoughts About Adobe Acrobat

(The title of this post is inspired by one of my favorite books of cartoons by one of my favorite New Yorker cartoonists, George Booth: Think Good Thoughts About a Pussycat.) I’ve been using Adobe’s Acrobat technology forever, and I’m a huge fan of the underlying technology. The user-facing software, however, stinks. It’s the same problem that you find in Microsoft…