My old friend Adam Hodgkin posed a question in a comment here which I think is worth a discussion.

I would be interested in the Macmillan view on why it has been possible to develop really excellent and profitable digital publishing for the Nature audience, and the commercial digital market still doesn't look at all convincing for trade publishing in general.

The first thing to say is that Macmillan doesn't have a view. Macmillan is made up of several thousand people all of whom have different views on more or less everything, thank goodness. This is my view.

1. Scientists are by their nature early adopters of technology and thus have had no problems moving from communicating in print to communicating digitally.

2. Scientific publishing has been intrinsically more profitable than trade book publishing. This allowed the major publishers and societies to invest the significant sums needed to create electronic delivery and storage platforms for scientific information. These platforms are a cornerstone for the creation of a new business and communication model.

3. Budgets for the acquisition of scientific information already existed and coud be readily transferred from print to digital acquisitions. These budgets were and are controlled by a professional cadre of librarians whose job is to ensure the best and most economic retrieval of information. They are the key partners to ensure highest standards.

4. The people who work in scientific publishing are by and large fascinated by the challenges of delivering often obscure information to a global audience and have embraced digital technology.

Trade book publishing has very different characteristics.

1. The general public has adopted some new technologies very quickly but to most people a book is a book - sheets of paper between covers, usable without batteries and readily portable.

2. Trade book publishing is usually a low-margin business and any spare cash has tended to be spent on investing in new authors and new marketing campaigns rather than long-term technological platforms. This is changing now with the emergence of solutions such as BookStore but this late movement hasn't helped a business model to develop.

3. Apart from the less-than-healthy public library market, there are no institutional budgets for the purchase of trade books and so no easy way of pump-priming the market.

4. The people who work in trade publishig are driven by the desire to find a great new author, to mix in the world of literature, to win literary prizes. Delivery mechanisms and complex technology are simply not high on their agendas. This is also changing but it will take time. 

And I suppose the final reason why trade books will find it harder to establish a digital model than scientific journals is that not all books are purchased simply to be read. They are purchased as gifts, as furniture, as status symbol, as insurance against boredom. None of these reasons is adequately solved by a digital version. A scientific paper is only purchased for its content.

However, none of this means we should not be investing in digital delivery of trade books. We owe it to our authors to invest in every means of finding an audience for their works. We owe it to them to hold their copyright material securely and to fight on their behalf to protect their rights. We need to serve readers in whatever way they choose. We need to work with public libraries to make digital and on-demand editions of books available through them. We need to use digital versions to promote books and to create digital libraries for research and study.

Trade books are different now but I'm convinced that the technological gap between general book publishing and scientific publishing will narrow - and the pace is gathering.

To finish today's blog on the future of books I thought I'd share a thought sent to me by an old colleague of mine in France. Apparently the most interesting analysis of publishers' and authors' rights issues and their interaction with the concepts of digital libraries, open access and public domain is to be found in the 1763 La lettre sur le commerce des livres by the always brilliant Denis Diderot. Apparently it has never been translated into English and it should be. Can anyone help?

I can't resist this quote (of no relevance whatsoever to books or publishing) from the man himself:

Il y a un peu de testicule au fond de nos sentiments les plus sublimes et de notre tendresse la plus épurée.