The Future Of Publishing Blog by Thad McIlroy

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October 21st, 2011

Amazon’s Kindle Format 8 Snubs the EPUB 3 Party

Compare these two statements about two different new-and-improved e-book specifications: “KF8 has over 150 new formatting capabilities including support for HTML5 and CSS3.” “HTML5 is the base language of EPUB3… The new baseline for style sheets is CSS2.1 with some CSS3 features added.” They sure sound similar. The first, published yesterday, describes Amazon’s just announced Kindle Format 8…

February 23rd, 2011

Shh! eBooks and the Quiet Conspiracy against Public Libraries

Last evening I wrote to a colleague who runs a regional association of trade book publishers. I thought I would share the letter: Hi xxx, I thought of you when I read this just now in today’s Wall Street Journal: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703529004576160421561955208.html I think it’s a very good article just because it presents the unvarnished truth…

September 16th, 2010

Just in Time: An Expert on the Future of Books

Phew! That was close. Just yesterday I read on Simon Pulman’s Transmythology blog (Story, Branded Entertainment & Transmedia) that “It is a given that 90% of books purchased will be digitally downloaded.” Today I learned from an “expert” that “the book is here to stay.” Professor Clingham is a professor of English — clearly not…

July 23rd, 2010

E-books Just Want To Be Free

I’ve known about the excellent Project Gutenberg for a long time now. It was founded in 1971 by Michael Hart and is the oldest digital library. I hadn’t been back to the site for several years because in my mind it was still the place where all you could download was ASCII text versions of…