Audible is the brainchild of Don Katz, a former journalist who recognised early the potential market for downloadable audio and built a company to serve that market. He has been immeasurably helped by an exclusive contract to serve Apple's i-tunes audio bookstore. More importantly, it is clear that downloading audiobooks is a much better technology than fiddling about with multiple CDs or tapes and that the next generation of in-car entertainment systems will include the ability to download on the road. The market potential is immense.

Macmillan has a very strong audio list and we now have an agreement with Audible UK to make it available throughout legitimate territories. We're gradually loading up all our titles and first out of the blocks are Wilbur Smith and Colin Dexter's brilliant Inspector Morse novels. I suspect that Desmond Tutu's reading of the The Gospel According to Judas coming out on 20 March might be the Spring bestseller.

From the future to the past. I am a member of the UK Literary Heritage Working Group and we have today launched a website. Our job is to emphasise the importance of literary archives as part of Britain's scholarly, cultural and educational heritage. While part of our remit is to develop ways of capturing digital archives it is also vital to hang on to manuscripts and papers from great contemporary and not so contemporary writers.

Last night we had a small gathering in my office to welcome a new member of our team, Vikram Savkar, and the beginnings of a completely new venture, Nature Education. Rather than reproduce our press release I've copied in a piece from the leading industry newsletter from Electronic Publishing Services. Another journey begins for our teams.

* Nature Publishing Group has launched Nature Education, a new division that will produce educational resources and tools for science students and teaching staff.  What is the new division’s strategy for this market?

by Kate Worlock, Director

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In recent years, Nature Publishing Group (NPG) has proven itself to be one of the most innovative scientific publishers, with experiments around open peer review and the launch of services such as Naturejobs.com (the first free scientific recruitment facility online), Nature Network Boston and Connotea.  The company has also demonstrated its desire to move into new markets - the launch of Macmillan Medical Communications and its Dissect Medicine service moved NPG into a strong position in medical publishing, building on the success of its relatively new Nature Clinical Practice medical journals division. 

The latest sector to be addressed is education.  Clearly Nature’s content, through its scientific journals, is already widely used by science professors, but Nature Education aims to provide tools for both teachers and students to facilitate access and use of this existing content, as well as content which is to be created specifically for educational purposes.  The new Publishing Director at Nature Education, Vikram Savkar, who was most recently at Pearson, has recognised the difficulties in addressing the undergraduate textbook market, and believes that “instructors and students are thirsty for learning environments that move beyond traditional textbooks and even course management systems to provide a highly interactive and personalised experience”.

While Nature Education is the group’s first attempt to address educational needs directly, there are plenty of valuable best practices that the new division could draw on from elsewhere in the group to support its activities.  For example, Nature has been working, through services like Nature Network Boston and Dissect Medicine, to develop community applications, and through Connotea to understand how tagging can add value for the end users.  It seems likely that Nature Education will follow in the footsteps of these services to create Web 2.0-style offerings likely to appeal to today’s science students, who have been educated in a very PC- and internet-centric manner.  Nature has also recognised the importance of personalised learning, highlighted in the recent 2020 Vision report on teaching and learning in the UK.  While this focuses on the K-12 age range, there is no reason why the teaching methods discussed could not apply effectively to other age groups.

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