About six months ago some colleagues in Germany launched a community site for book lovers Lovely Books. It is a great success and because imitation is the sincerest form of flattery (and because we asked prior permission) we have copied it. Yesterday saw the launch of the beta version of the English-language lovelybooks.com. The more people who sign up and use the site the better it will become. Do please give it a go and feed back too. Here's a shot of the German version.

I was castigated recently by a commenter, Alan Kellogg, for the pricing of a pdf in Nature.. I had actually linked to a free pdf - Nature makes some of its content available free of charge as well as the bulk being available on subscription or 'by the drink' - but he latched on to the price of associated articles:

'$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?'

I think he is missing the point about value of information. It cannot be measured by price per page. It cannot be measured by the cost of paper or replaceability. It can only be measured by its usefulness to the reader and to some extent in relation to the cost of producing it. In the case of articles in Nature we have a rejection rate of well over 90%. This is an extremely costly process requiring teams of skilled scientists separating the wheat from the chaff and publishing only the very best and most pertinent articles. $30 is not a reflection of the length of the article, it is for the knowledge that the article in question is reliable and in part it reflects the cost of NOT publishing the rejected articles.

Finally, a very strange postscript to the blog linking the new Harry Potter film and Wisden Cricketers' Almanack from the Daily Telegraph:

" He [Daniel Radcliffe] has, he says, been plagued by strange dreams lately, although he cannot lay the blame at Harry Potter's door. "I've dreamt I'm being stalked by an England cricketer. I don't know what prompted it - although I've been watching huge amounts of cricket - but for some reason Andrew Strauss was being paid to stalk me. I woke up with a cricket bat in my hand.""