Kate Mosse is the latest literary edition to Who's Who.

Was it generated by spell-checking software or...?

Just about every publishing house is parading its digital credentials right now. Some have even worked out the difference between an e-book and a website. As part of our attempt to learn more about the new world Timo Hannay (creator of the outstanding Nascent blog and Nature's director of all far-out matters) has for the past couple of years organised a series of presentations for our people (and other guests) in London.

The speakers have included Jimmy Wales (founder of Wikipedia; the science fiction author Cory Doctorow (and co-editor of boingboing and a leading creative commons evangelist); Cory Ondrejka (CTO of Linden Lab which owns and manages the futuristic Second Life); and many others including stars from Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon and many more specifically scientific organisations at the cutting edge of the digital revolution.

Why do I mention this, apart from the desire to thank Timo, to encourage Macmillan people to come to future events and to show off how good we are at embracing the future? It's because if the book world is to play any part in this future it has to do more than  pay lip service to digitisation, it has to to begin to 'live' the future.

Our sister company in Germany, Holtzbrinck Networks, has just announced the acquisition of the largest student social networking website in Germany, StudiVZ. In a very short period it has attracted 30% of all college students in Germany, Austria and Switzerland to register and use it. Similarly in the English-speaking world Bebo has atttracted millions of young people. It's easy to be cynical about these and other community developments and there's little doubt that some of the material published on them is sub-standard and even offensive but they represent a vibrant part of the reading and writing public and are therefore part of a publisher's core market.

I'm sure that books, booksellers and publishers will be around in ten years. I am equally sure that the most successful ones will be those who have invested early in digitising their authors' words, learnt how to protect and sell those words to new audiences, worked with existing and new distributors to find audiences, and kept their ears and eyes open to strange, wonderful and disturbing new people and new concepts. On the way we'll make mistakes and these will be showcased as evidence that the market is really about reading a novel in the bath or on the beach and nothing else.

I suspect that there will be two main criteria for success:

1. The ability to think and act innovatively; and

2. The ability to ignore the jeering from the sidelines.

Finally, a rather strange electronic New Year's greetings card from my friends at Random House. Switch on the sound for full effect. I wonder who the rocket is aimed at.