Once upon a time, when I was a medical editor at Oxford University Press (incidentally did anyone else notice this rather intriguing headline Oxford Publishing Sold last week?) I came across an internal memo from earlier days saying something like 'since Blackwell's have failed to achieve higher discounts from scientific and medical publishers they have decided to go into publishing themselves'. This signalled the foundation of Blackwell Scientific Publishing which, after various mergers and acquisitions, was sold last year for £600m, many many times more valuable than the wonderful bookshop which spawned it.

The concern at the time was that Blackwell would favour their own publications when it came to retailing, thus disadvantaging other publishers. I don't think this ever happened and in any event the Blackwell shop was never a dominant part of the overall market for scientific or medical books.

However, I was reminded of this by an announcement from Amazon yesterday. I urge you to follow this link to a blog by Timo Hannay commenting on the announcement. Please read his thoughts, read the press release from Amazon's CreateSpace, read Timo's piece again. Sit down and think about it from a book publisher's point of view. Is Timo right? Could Amazon succeed where Blackwell were only partly succesful (albeit £600m richer)? Interesting times.

On a lighter note I was at a meeting yesterday which included a number of academics. One of them reminded me of a marvellous quote which he attributed to C.P.Snow but which appears to belong to Henry Kissinger. Either way, it's a great quote and applicable to many situations:

'University politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small.'

The stakes in the publishing business right now are not small, so let's hope the politics are therefore not vicious.