I was in Surrey yesterday attending part of the brilliantly organised Palgrave Macmillan sales conference. Do click on the link which will take you to their US site which naturally enough has a slant towards books published originally in the USA but which are of global interest. The blandness of offerings from the much of the retail trade can sometimes undermine confidence in the publishing of high-quality, challenging and non-TV-related titles but a day at that sales conference and a trawl through the websites here and in the USA dispelled all that. And the surroundings were pretty palatial (but economic) too.

I used the opportunity to discuss with our sales and publishing people some of the concerns, threats and opportunities of the digital age. Of course, Palgrave Macmillan, being an academic publisher, has fewer concerns about territorial erosion than a general trade publisher would.

Nonetheless there are real challenges and the principal one in my opinion is the devaluation and commoditisation of information. 'Free' does not always (or often) mean better but somehow the Internet has encouraged the view that information should be free. The row over the Google heist showed that many people value physical objects such as laptop computers far more highly than the information, wisdom, entertainment the computer might contain. 

Another area where 'free' is considered ethically superior is within the open access debate which has been reignited recently by Yale University science libraries' decision not to continue funding BioMed Central's open-access publishing experiment on the basis that the business model was not viable in the long run. BMC have responded robustly and the debate will continue but it is just one example of the turbulent waters in which publishers are having to swim.

All this simply underscores the importance of the value of copyright, not just to authors and publishers, but to students, teachers, researchers, readers and to all developers of new ideas. Thank goodness there are powerful laws and organisations protecting creativity.