The posting on author royalties continues to generate interesting comments but perhaps the most challenging response comes from Evan Schnittman on the excellent OUPblog. He argues for a single payment for all standard publishing rights in a title for a defined period - and then spoils the purity of his propsal by introducing 'kickers' for higher than anticipated sales, which is a royalty by any other name, but let that pass. I'm not sure I agree with everything he says but his penultimate paragraph bears reading:

'The state of book publishing requires a radical change to the standard business practices that have existed for decades. This has to happen from within the core assumptions of the most basic elements of the business. Retail price vs. gross earnings are just window dressing on the real problems of trade publishing.'

The author of Typo, David Silverman has uploaded a video about booking a hotel room - it's a joy.

It's the first day of September which means Autumn is with us. It also means I have to compile the monthly statisitics for this blog. August was a relatively quiet month (unsurprisingly) with 77284 visits against 84682 in July but 80% up on August 2006's 42944. It brings the total visits to the site to over the million at 1,068,510.