The Future Of Publishing Blog by Thad McIlroy
January 27th, 2016
“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…
January 18th, 2016
It’s a great and timely idea: “Five-Minute Manifestos” for the future of the book business. Philip Jones, editor of the UK’s The Bookseller started the project as a lead-up to last December’s FutureBook Conference in London. But publication has continued since the conference. Jones first outlined the goals of the series in Those Magnificent Manifestos. Porter Anderson is serving as the…
October 27th, 2015
My concern was never about the conference. I was worried about the conga line. Three hundred authors, 90% women, drawn together for four days at a deluxe south Florida resort. The TradeWinds Island Grand offers “11 unique dining and entertainment venues” including Awakening’s Lobby Bar, the Sharktooth Tavern and Salty’s Poolside Beach Bar (“what’s a beach vacation without a brightly colored…
September 28th, 2015
In 2008, Heidi Julavits published a marvelous short piece, The Writers in the Silos, a satirical glance at where writing and publishing is headed in “our current conglomerating, lowest-common-denominator, demographically targeted publishing industry.” I fell in love with it and bought the rights to reproduce the article on The Future of Publishing. As it’s buried somewhere at…
September 3rd, 2012
We’ve seen a lot of righteous indignation following David Streitfeld’s recent New York Times article on the occasional practice of paying for positive book reviews on Amazon. I read the story and moved on without giving it much thought: I assumed that everyone knew that the review system on Amazon was rigged.