Sunday, July 01, 2007
Darwin

I attended the final sessions of the First Bloomsbury Conference on E-publishing and E-publications and was asked to make predictions for the future of the industry as a wrap-up. This is, of course, a completely impossible and futile task. I don't think I was particularly helpful or insightful but the event took place in the Darwin Theatre at University College London which gave me the excuse to quote the great man. As readers of this blog may have ascertained, I'm not a great lover of mission statements or management dicta ('passionate about gardening', 'do no evil', 'for the love of it' etc) but I do think that Charles Darwin got it right when he wrote:

'It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.'

If Macmillan had to adopt a by-line perhaps that should be the one.

 
One of the good things about working on this blog is that I've made acquaintances through it. I was waiting for a lift in Sydney earlier this year and a guy in jogging kit came up to me to ask whether I was the Richard Charkin who blogs. Similarly in New York recently. But even better is that people send me books from time to time just out of friendliness, I think. This arrived from the author, David Silverman. The book, Typo, is published by Soft Skull Press, an independent house in Brooklyn. Its subject matter is unpromising - 350 pages about a typesetting company going bust. It is absolutely brilliant. Everyone in the publishing business should read it and most people in any sort of business should too. It's currently at number 51754 at Amazon.com and 241540 at Amazon.co.uk. Do yourself a favour and read it. Charles Darwin would have approved.
 
As this is the first of the month I continue the tradition of boring you with the blog statistics from the previous month. June saw 136,064 visits, up from May's 81,296. It was the highest month by far and brings total visits since launch to 906,544 - the million mark beckons. The June numbers were boosted by the coverage of the Google heist posting. A 'normal' week has  about 20,000 visits. The week of 3 June had 42,809. Things are back to normal now, as the chart below shows.
 
 
This shows the geographical breakdown by continent for June. Blue is Europe, purple North America, green Asia, yellow Oceania and red South America.
 
 
 
The top five countries were USA (21654 visits), UK (9841), China (5655), Germany (3550) and France (3048). I found the China and France scores higher than I'd have expected and suprised how relatively few visits we get from India (1839), Canada (1069), and Australia (866).
#    |  Comments [8]  | 
7/1/2007 8:29:30 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
I should very much like to read Typo, but will my independent bookseller be able to get it for me, I wonder?

Will ask tomorrow morning when ordering some other books.
Anne Weale
7/1/2007 9:16:22 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
Ah, change. The thing that humans find the most challenging of concepts.

Two thoughts.

The sharp bend is not end of the road...unless you fail to make the turn.

If you always do what you always did...you'll always get what you always got.

Which proves you can't always get what you want. But if you try sometimes you might find, you get what you need. With thanks to Mick & Keef.

Richard Havers
7/1/2007 12:09:56 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
Anne,

I'm not really sure why you single out your independent bookseller to query supply of this title. It does indeed sound interesting. It is published by Soft Skull in the US. Some Soft Skull titles have UK distribution through Turnaround (which would make it easy for any UK bookshop to obtain), but not this one. It will therefore have to be sourced from the US; easy if you are a shop with an account with Ingrams or Baker and Taylor.

On Richard's recommendation I will have copies by Thursday and at a decent price.

Any of the chains, were they to order it for you would take at least twice to three times as long and exchange the $ for a straight £.

Amazon uk quote 1 to 3 weeks.

Hope this helps.

Oh, and Soft Skull are on our (genuine) MySpace friends page as we regularly import and sell their non-uk titles as a matter of course.
Jonathan Main
7/1/2007 7:31:23 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
Richard -

That is one of my favorite quotes. It's been on my email signature for a few years now!

Ann

(PS It was nice meeting you in NY - blogging is so much fun that way - we get to meet people we may never have known otherwise!)
ann michael
7/2/2007 10:47:21 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
But did he really say it? I was wondering where it came from when I saw it also on Eoin Purcell's blog, and now I see Ann M has been using it for years. But is it really something he said or has it just been passed around (and where did you nick it from? Eoin or Ann? Or somone even more learned?)
Here is a link which suggests it may be a bit synthetic (ie one of those things that he ought to have said, but which thanks to the internet has now become a fully fledged Darwin quote)
http://ask.metafilter.com/7586/
Adam Hodgkin
7/2/2007 7:15:40 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
Oh Adam - I'm so bummed about this. Please tell me that my that one of my other favorites is legitimate!

"You must be the change you want to see in the world.” – Mahatma Ghandi
ann michael
7/2/2007 11:45:35 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
Adam,
Its a bloody great quote one way or the other! Perhaps I'll just get ride of the attribution! Only kidding, time for a new one I fear.

Richard,
I ordered Typo today looks like a great read. I had a feeling I had already read a short version of the story ages ago somewhere and a bit of digging came up with the story linked to below! If the book is even half as good as the article I'll enjoy it.
Eoin
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2007/05/09/outsourcing/index_np.html
Eoin Purcell
7/5/2007 12:46:34 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
Thank you for the wonderful review. What author doesn't want to hear, "It's absolutely brilliant."?

Also, the power of Richard's blog is evident. For about a week my sales rank on Amazon UK had gone from 200,000+ to 20,000+. That's an order of magnitude. That's pretty amazing.
David Silverman