At this time of year the media world is awash with predictions. The Booksellers Association runs a blog authored by (I prefer 'written by') Martyn Daniels. It's well worth investigating but just in case you're not up to clicking post holiday celebrations here are his predictions for our industry in 2007:

• Macmillan’s audio MP3 player. Whether it is a promotional gimmick or the next audio format is immaterial as it will certainly create noise and stir others into action in this obvious format area.
• 508 compliance which may seem a million miles away to us Brits but signals a new impetus to audio, web site design and will help bodies such as the RNIB in its cause.
• New technology, in the form of OLED screens, or the Hearst reader.
• The announcement and initial roll out of a new distribution environment and services to support digital content within the existing channel.
• The start of real POD services based not on short print runs but distributed printing at affordable prices. Maybe a BOD (bind on demand) model to support customised printing.
• Richer and richer bibliographic services and the need for every publisher to engage in its provision, even if they don’t sell digital content.
• Increased importance of Internet sales, emarketing and community engagement and participation. Success will be achieved increasingly by engagement and word of mouth than wallpapering web pages with books and offers.
• Omnivore fears will stoke more publishers to join their ranks but major publishers will continue to build their repositories and control their digital assets.
• Booksellers will increasingly sell old, used, new and digital side by side. Currency is only one aspect of selection and selection is what booksellers have always done best.

Change in publishing is definitely in the air but some things change more slowly than others. This photo of our Basingstoke offices dates from the 1980s and nothing has changed.

In my January 1 entry I published our blog statistics for 2006 including a challenge for our IT department:

This blog has now completed a full year. In December we had 60,400 visits down from 63,375 in November (the effect of the holiday season I hope rather than anything sinister). This brings the total for the year to 399,947, tantalisingly close to a milestone. With the statistics software I have I cannot tell how many of these are unique, nor how many are from Macmillan employees. Maybe next year our IT department can come up with a zero-cost way of answering these questions.

IT have now responded and it turns out that during the year we served 46,327 distinct hosts. Some hosts will represent many unique visitors but at least I now know that there have been a significant number of 'uniques'.