I know that this blog sometimes has spelling mistakes - mea culpa. I do try to eliminate them but I type badly and fast and make mistakes. Does it matter? Yes, it upsets me. We are a publishing company and should know how to spell and we should care about getting things right all the time. More importantly (and even more importantly in a computer age where successful searching by and large depends on accurate spelling) bad spelling causes problems.

For instance roughly half of Macmillan's internal reports used to spell Ottakers (sic). Which meant that to find out the total Ottakars sales you had to search on both spellings. It's also a bit insulting billing a customer twice because we can't decide how to spell him/her. Of course this is now a lot easier,although is it Waterstones or Waterstone's?

However, that is nothing compared to the horror I found on the main Macmillan website this morning (which I hope will be corrected by the time you read this):

Picador celebrates the inclusion of two of it's authors on the Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2006 Longlist

It was like a knife to my heart. Can everyone in Macmillan please learn the difference between it's and its - please. And if the rest of the world would follow suit I'd be a happier guy. Or is this yet another sign of fast-approaching grumpy old bookman-itis? Aaaargh.