Tom McCluskey

In early February I got to head over to New York to attend O’Reilly’s Tools of Change conference. It was a great time, and I learned a lot about exactly the sort of stuff I’m interested in; namely, how publishers are dealing with technology and what sort of problems and opportunities new technology is opening up. After I got back to Portland, Kent Watson from PubWest (who is also one of our instructors at PSU’s publishing graduate program) asked me and Victoria Blake from Underland Press to join him  in talking to the members of PubWest about the sort of stuff we learned at the conference. Read the rest of this entry »

Well, I finally went and did something I talked about doing a while ago: I went and switched carriers to T-Mobile from Verizon and got myself a G1. I had been planning to wait until June, as that’s when the court will approve or reject the settlement between Google and the Authors’ Guild regarding Google Book Search, and I had (and still have) hopes that Google would work to make sure that the Android phone OS that the G1 uses and their Book Search books would play nicely together. Well, it’s not June yet, but I went for it anyway. How come? That and more, after the break. Read the rest of this entry »

It seems like an accepted truism that small publishers are more nimble and quicker to adapt to change than large publishing houses, probably on the basis of all the layers of bureaucracy that a large publishing house has to claw through in order to change the status quo. When analyzing a publishing house in terms of content, this is probably the case; a smaller editorial staff means that there are less people to object to an “experimental” book.

I would have to disagree, though,  with all the people out there who say that the nimbleness of small publishers makes them ideally situated to take advantage of the possibilities of ebooks. The problem here is that we aren’t talking about new content–we’re talking about new delivery channels. These new delivery channels require some technical expertise to be able to work effectively with, let alone imaginatively. And that requires staff whose jobs are to check out new technologies and see how to do stuff with them; in short, it requires a research and development team. Read the rest of this entry »

The future of publishing is a big thing to speculate about; there’s a lot of change happening in a lot of different directions. There are the purely technological changes, like new ebook readers coming out; the business changes, like corporations buying up each other; and there are the distribution changes, like distributors providing content for new devices. Then on top of those, there are the social changes–how people interact with books, and with each other when they read books. Things will certainly change in the next ten years or so, and those changes will be largely in ways that we can’t predict now. There are too many variables to be able to predict with any degree of certainty how things will look.
Read the rest of this entry »