This blog has now completed a full year. In December we had 60,400 visits down from 63,375 in November (the effect of the holiday season I hope rather than anything sinister). This brings the total for the year to 399,947, tantalisingly close to a milestone. With the statistics software I have I cannot tell how many of these are unique, nor how many are from Macmillan employees. Maybe next year our IT department can come up with a zero-cost way of answering these questions.

Nonetheless I am amazed and gratified by the volume of visitors and the amount of (usually) kind and constructive correspondence. The paucity of comments is a shame but I guess people have better things to do than populating this blog. I also wish more Macmillan people would contribute. There are some regular commentators, some of whom I've enjoyed arguing with. There have been only two comments which I've had to edit away for reasons of taste. It's worrying that the entries which generate the most and the most heated debate are those concerned with the British book trade and the relationship between publishers and independent booksellers. I accept that there are important issues here. I cannot accept, however, that these are more important than the impact of the digital revolution on publishing as a whole or the need to develop new structures for publishing to take account of globalisation and new reader tastes.

And while on the subject of literary taste I came across the following quote in a BBC report.

'It entertains, as sport must do, but it is without heft, or any substance, it is like a book picked up at an AH Wheeler & Co bookstand at Calcutta's Howrah Station and discarded on arrival in Delhi.'

I do not know the bookshop in question and I have never been to Calcutta. The sport in question is also irrelevant. You know exactly what the writer is trying to convey. The sport in question is, of course, cricket (the one-day version) and the journalist is Rohit Brijnath. His style of sports writing is hardly ever found in the British media. It is correct, old-fashioned English with falir and substance. It is discoveries like this which make me so enthusiastic about our investments in India. This is not a just a country for outsourcing or manufacture. This is a place of creativity, insight and literary adventure. Fortunately it is also complex and its rules of engagement will bamboozle all but the most determined would-be investors.

Macmillan has been part of Indian publishing since 1892 and we intend to make 2007 the best year ever with Macmillan India leading the rest of the group in growth and innovation. January will see our Gurgaon-based MPS Technologies launch of BookStore for the German Boersenverein and for Macmillan companies in the UK and Australia. More customers and more functionality are lined up for implementation throughout the year as we build on our lead over competitors. ScholarlyStats goes from strength to strength as librarians around the world discover the efficiencies and cost savings of using the system. On the text processing end of the business we are investing heavily in enhanced systems for all our clients and have built formidable resources for book as well as journal activities in Charon Tec and ICC Macmillan. On the publishing side we shall be publishing more and better than ever and investing in new markets in education both school and college, scholarship and science, Internet, fiction and non-fiction, in English and the vernacular languages. It will take the all the ingenuity and efforts of our 3000 people in India to make all this work and I have no doubt they will succeed.

And as a change from the usual pictures of the Taj Mahal here's my favourite spot in India the interior of the Cochin synagogue - a very strange and wonderful cultural mix.