One of the most innovative publishers in the world is the computer book publisher O'Reilly. They have been at the cutting edge of collaborations with Google and Amazon, with copyright-lite experimentation etc. It is therefore with great delight that I spotted this paragraph from O'Reilly Radar about the sales of computer books:

If you wonder whether it matters to publishers whether books appear in stores given that they can be ordered online, try breathing through a straw. You can get all the air you want if you lie low, but you'd better not try any strenuous activity. Retail distribution is like the alveoli in our lungs -- it increases the surface area for respiration, except in this case, rather than oxygen binding to hemoglobin, it's customers binding to possible products to purchase. People go to Amazon and other online retailers with specific purchases in mind. Despite all Amazon's brilliant work on collaborative filtering and recommendations, a computer screen just doesn't match up to a physical bookstore when it comes to browsing and the chance discoveries that spark an unplanned purchase.

What more can I say? I think the Booksellers Association should invite Tim O'Reilly to give the keynote address at their next conference.

In the staff canteen in our Kings Cross offices yesterday I got into a conversation about the death of the musical. I argued, for no particular reason, that a more obvious case was the dearth of listenable operas since Puccini packed it in. I was, of course, reprimanded and corrected by my younger and betters and thoroughly shamed by the fact that we have just published a book as a result of a contemporary opera.

David Frost's brilliant book about his confrontation with Richard Nixon follows the extraordinarily successful opera Nixon in China and the play Frost/Nixon. So drama and opera (and I'd argue musicals too) still flourish.