I attended the final sessions of the First Bloomsbury Conference on E-publishing and E-publications and was asked to make predictions for the future of the industry as a wrap-up. This is, of course, a completely impossible and futile task. I don't think I was particularly helpful or insightful but the event took place in the Darwin Theatre at University College London which gave me the excuse to quote the great man. As readers of this blog may have ascertained, I'm not a great lover of mission statements or management dicta ('passionate about gardening', 'do no evil', 'for the love of it' etc) but I do think that Charles Darwin got it right when he wrote:
'It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.'
If Macmillan had to adopt a by-line perhaps that should be the one.
One of the good things about working on this blog is that I've made acquaintances through it. I was waiting for a lift in Sydney earlier this year and a guy in jogging kit came up to me to ask whether I was the Richard Charkin who blogs. Similarly in New York recently. But even better is that people send me books from time to time just out of friendliness, I think. This arrived from the author,
David Silverman. The book,
Typo, is published by
Soft Skull Press, an independent house in Brooklyn. Its subject matter is unpromising - 350 pages about a typesetting company going bust. It is absolutely brilliant. Everyone in the publishing business should read it and most people in any sort of business should too. It's currently at number 51754 at Amazon.com and 241540 at Amazon.co.uk. Do yourself a favour and read it. Charles Darwin would have approved.
As this is the first of the month I continue the tradition of boring you with the blog statistics from the previous month. June saw 136,064 visits, up from May's 81,296. It was the highest month by far and brings total visits since launch to 906,544 - the million mark beckons. The June numbers were boosted by the coverage of the
Google heist posting. A 'normal' week has about 20,000 visits. The week of 3 June had 42,809. Things are back to normal now, as the chart below shows.
This shows the geographical breakdown by continent for June. Blue is Europe, purple North America, green Asia, yellow Oceania and red South America.
The top five countries were USA (21654 visits), UK (9841), China (5655), Germany (3550) and France (3048). I found the China and France scores higher than I'd have expected and suprised how relatively few visits we get from India (1839), Canada (1069), and Australia (866).