The trade press is a strange thing. An editor moving from one publishing house to another warrants headlines. As does a publisher signing a contract with an author for a book which will be lucky to sell 5000 copies. Or a discount promotion in a bookshop chain. Here is a recent and fairly typical Publishing News home page. The fourteenth item is News in Brief and the eighth and last story in that section is:

DAVID Worlock has been named Non-Executive Chairman of HarperCollins UK, and Ian Bedwell is appointed International Business Development Director. Worlock is currently Chief Research Fellow at Outsell Inc and his career has included roles at Thomson Corp and Pearson. Bedwell has enjoyed a long career at VNU, which he left earlier this year.

I think it it possibly the most important news item in the whole issue.

It is not my job to be generous about competitors and I have been known to be a tad dismissive of some strange bits of self-promotion (for instance, here). However, this appointment of David Worlock by HarperCollins UK shows that at least one British trade publisher is beginning to understand the importance of the digital revolution and the need for fundamental change.

I first met David several centuries ago when he was setting up Eurolex, a pioneer legal database business, for Thomson. He was a digital native then and he still is. I also heard an excellent talk last week by another HarperCollins executive, Brian Murray, who is Group President of the company worldwide. My guess is that HC are putting into place the management building blocks to take decisive action when it comes to finding new markets for books in electronic form. Building platforms from which to sell (e.g. BookStore ) is an essential, quite tricky and quite costly first step but the real difficulty is re-engineering a workforce used to the old ways of doing things. That's where people like David and Brian come in.

And Macmillan has people like that too!