Saturday, July 07, 2007
Parallel universes

It sometimes seems that the book trade is operating in several parallel universes - authors, agents, general publishers, educational publishers, specialist publishers, independent booksellers, supermarkets, wholesalers, second-hand booksellers etc.

What I didn't know until this morning is that the first scientific proposal for the existence of parallel universes is fifty years old today. It was part of a PhD thesis developed at Princeton by Hugh Everett III.

You can read about how this young quantum physicist came up with the concept here. This special feature of Nature also heralds the return of Futures, a weekly series of scifi short stories. This is where fact and fiction meet and where the parallel universes of Nature and Pan overlap.

Back to reality and our monthly statement from Google Adsense. June generated $43.47, the second highest month ever. Total income has reached the heights of $338. Unfortunately it seems that the value of the dollar against sterling is declining almost as much as the account is increasing. More seriously, the strength of sterling is posing significant problems for British exporting publishers. One more thing for us to worry about. 

#    |  Comments [2]  | 
7/7/2007 6:16:11 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
When the $ starts to strengthen it will start pushing air fares up which will reduce the numbers taking trips abroad from Britain. That will give people a margin of disposable income for book buying, the only problem will be if this is offset by the reduction in books sold at airports due to declining passenger numbers!!

:)
Richard Havers
7/8/2007 5:10:02 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
Found out about it via Instapundit (www.instapundit.com). Noticed a problem...

$30.00 for a file of an article? A file you don't need to print, bind, or mail? A file the customer can download. A file you don't need to replace because the customer is getting a copy?

You can find 300 page PDFs on the web for $10.00, and the publisher make a profit. How long is the typical Nature article? PDF publishing is a whole different thing than print publishing. For one thing, you can sell PDF for a lot cheaper than the print version. Isn't it about time you started.

BTW, if the head honcho at Nature has trouble adapting to t new way of doing things, maybe he's in the wrong job.
Alan Kellogg