It is of course trite to say the French are different. If there is another way of doing things they'll discover it and probably make it work. it wasn't until I started typing this that I realized that a French keyboard layout is almost entirely different to an Anglo-Saxon one and entirely non-intuitive to an Anglo-Saxon person (qwerty becomes azerty, full stop is on shift and the rest of the punctuation marks are scattered randomly). One more blow for globalization and American hegemony. Ah well, please forgive the typos.

I am here in Paris on behalf of British publishers to defend our authors' copyrights from the threat of digital kleptomania (Quelles modalités d'accès aux textes numériques sous droits?). Digital technologies offer the greatest opportunities for centuries for publishers but only if we can ensure our authors a proper income from the distribution of their works and develop business models which genuinely work for the reader and user of information.

Scientific and legal publishers have invested heavily in digital infrastructure which has enabled them to offer their authors faster and more enhanced publication; their readers lower cost, better designed and more universal access; and their owners enough cash to continue to invest. These publishers work closely with the new digital giants (Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Amazon etc) and their aims seem to be aligned.

On the contrary typical book publishers have yet to create the necessary platforms and the new 'players' see that as an opportunity to move into the book business and a moral justification for turning a blind eye to the niceties of copyright.

Book publishers need to fight vigorously to maintain strong copyright protection for their authors. Copyright not only rewards authors for their creativity and labour, it also is a protector of freedom of speech.

But book publishers must do more than simply fight on principle and by turning to lawyers. They must show that they are willing to invest money as well. They must build digital warehouses which can protect the copyrights. They must build digital delivery systems which can work with search engines to present and sell their authors' work to new markets in new forms. They must be willing to take investment risk. They must work with authors and distributors to help build new and better business models.

All this and continue to sell books too. Bonne journée.

Our print sourcing operation in Hong Kong (Macmillan Production Asia Ltd) received an order this morning for 2000 deckchairs. As everything we do requires a standard book number in order to satisfy our computer requirements, these will probably be the first literary deckchairs in history.

Which reminds me of an early lesson in interpreting publishers' stock systems. During my first week at the Octopus Publishing Group I was checking the list of overstocks (all publishers have them) and came across 10,000 unsold copies of 'Chinese Food the Wok Way' (or similar) which had been written down to zero value. "Crazy!" I screamed. "It must be possible to remainder them and get some price however small". "No!" the distribution director screamed back: "the beansprouts have germinated". It was a food pack for Marks and Spencer masquerading as a book and brought a new meaning to old stock.

And I should mention to readers that MPA can and will source almost anything from China for you - from cherry blossom to shampoo bottles - as long as the quantities and your credit rating are good.

The Nature Publishing Group recognizes that in today's digital environment it must constantly strive to provide more than well-filtered information; it must also provide valuable digital services for scientists and clinicians that help them to communicate with one another more effectively. I asked Timo Hannay, NPG's Director of Web Publishing, to guest on the blog as he can describe the group's latest web initiative much better than I can:

"One of the most important roles of a publisher is to help readers to find writers with something interesting and relevant to say. The arrival of the web means that we are no longer limited to doing this by the traditional means of filtering and editing content by hand (though that will remain an essential part of the process for a long time to come). Increasingly we can also help readers to help themseleves — and each other — when in search of information or entertainment.

One important experiment we've been conducting in this area is Connotea, Nature's free social bookmarking service for scientists and clinicians. For the last year-and-a-half or so, it has allowed users to post web links of interest and to 'tag' them with one or more keywords in order to make them easy to retrieve later. (For example, you might choose to save a bookmark to this blog entry under the tags "social bookmarking", "Connotea" and "Macmillan"). Also, by storing everyone's links on a central server, it can generate recommendations based on people's overlapping interests, which is where the 'social' part of 'social boomarking' comes in.

With usage growing daily, it's clear that a lot of people already find Connotea a valuable service. But we've only scratched the surface of its potential. In particular, we're keen to make the underlying data useful to other sites. That's why, with generous funding from the UK Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), we have just released software that adds Connotea functionality to EPrints, an institutional repository platform developed at the University of Southampton. By installing this software on their own repositories, administrators can allow their users to bookmark and tag content in Connotea, and to browse Connotea's recommendations, all without leaving the repository website. This adds useful new functionality to the repository, makes the content held there easier to discover, and makes Connotea more useful to everyone by adding more information to its data pool. For further details see this blog post by Ben Lund, who runs Connotea.

Where will all this lead?  Frankly, we're not sure.  But the use of communal data such as shared bookmarks and tags (and the collective taxonomies, or 'folksonomies', that arise from them) is already attracting a lot of interest among clever researchers who are developing ways to manage information in this era of over-abundance.  We at Nature think that collaborative services like Connotea will become an important part of the answer, and when that happens we want to have a role to play.  That's how publishers can stay relevant even as the world around us passes through its most disruptive period since our industry came into being.

Marcel Proust's multi-volume work was once described in a book club catalogue as the Great French work of comic genius. And I remember OUP once published Humour in the Works of Proust but that's not the point of this blog.

My past was brought back to me by a flurry of articles and books about a close friend of my young adulthood, Nick Drake. Over the years his music has grown in popularity and he now appears to be up there with the other 60s and 70s dead pop icons.Do try out his music if you haven't yet. It has stood the test of time. 

And just recently I tripped over a website dedicated to another dead friend from that era, Julian Allen. We travelled together across the USA in an open-top Ford Mustang and thought we were really cool. Julian was really cool and his art only tells half the story. He was a professional illustrator working to deadlines and for money but I think he's captured the spirit of the times better than anyone.

Predictably, the Observer's silly list of powerful people in the UK book trade has generated a fair degree of comment, debate and enhanced the traffic to this blog. I have been sent two alternative lists (top ten only, most people don't have the leisure time to dream up fifty). I wonder how many people can without reference name the jobs of each of the people in this first list but I reckon it is a lot closer to the truth than the Observer one.

1. Sir Crispin Davis

2. Dame Marjorie Scardino

3. Richard Harrington

4. Professor Sir Ron Cooke

5. Kate Swann

6. Arnaud Nourry

7. Peter Olson

8. Peter Rigby

9. James Purnell

10. Kit van Tulleken

And the second is more literary but again more realistic than the Observer:

1. Scott Pack

2. Amanda Ross

3. Nigel Newton

4. Victoria Barnsley

5. Gail Rebuck

6. Richard Charkin

7. The bookbuyer at WHS whoever that is

8. Jamie Byng

9. Caroline Gascoigne

10. Martin Goff - still!

One of the most dynamic areas of business right now is India, where Macmillan India is already a leading provider of typesetting, copyediting, project management, digitisation, graphics, software and technology services to major publishers in UK, Europe and the US.  The company is already a global leader in services to scientific journal publishers. With its recent acquisition of Interactive Composition Corp (ICC) - and before that Charon Tec in Chennai - it is now also a major supplier of full services to book publishers. 

ICC is based in  Portland, Oregon with a wholly owned subsidiary in Delhi. It employs 300 people and provides typesetting and other services to major book publishers in the US. This is a strategic acquisition . It enables us to achieve two major objectives of having a significant presence in the   US to maintain close and efficient service levels for our customers, and enhancing our Indian management and workforce.

Macmillan India now employs more than 3000 people in Bangalore, Chennai, Delhi, Kolkata, Mumbai and many other cities. Unlike many publishers following the herd into India, Macmillan has been there since 1893, fifty years after the original foundation of the firm, and it is a real part of the social, educational and informational infrastructure of the country.

You may see that I have added a link to London Cross. This is strange but appealing idea for a 'book' describing absolutely everything you see if you walk across London in a straight line from two staring starting points. I walk a huge amount in London and so naturally empathise with the idea.

I have yet to find a better way to get round London or most other cities. It takes very little longer than a taxi or a bus. It makes you (slightly) fitter. It allows you to make phone calls and send emails without being arrested (although there is admittedly a risk of being run over). It increases the chances of unexpectedly meeting old friends. It forces you to minimise the amount of paper transported. It allows you to listen to great music or Test Match Special without feeling guilty.It is very cheap.

When I have a spare weekend I'm going to attempt Paul K Lyons's routes in London Cross.

On a completely separate note, there was much wringing of hands when we announced a new fiction imprint, Macmillan New Writing. Dedicated solely to publishing authors’ first novels submitted to Macmillan in the UK - usually direct rather than through an agent - the initiative was attacked by some sections of the press as a commercial gimmick and was called ‘the Ryanair of publishing’ by The Guardian.

However, it has since attracted widespread support from authors, the book trade and the publishing business press, and I'm pleased to see that as we near the launch of the first six novels, my fellow blogger the Grumpy Old Bookman has offered his sanguine opinion.

This comes from snowy Stuttgart where my blog seems to have transmogrified itself into German - ain't technology wonderful?

The main conversations here all relate to the chances of the German football team in the upcoming World Cup. People are pretty pessimistic but we English know better. Apart from a glitch (or should it be glitsch) in 1966 Germany always wins - at least against England, and everyone knows that that is the only match which really counts.

And while on global domination it seems that my friends at Google have been doing some excellent public relations at the London Book Fair. I introduced several Google managers to the joys of the Chelsea Arts Club on Sunday evening and am hoping that the experience will have shocked them into understanding publishers' concerns, changing their policy with regard to the digitísation of in copyright books and maybe even changing their overblown mission statement!

I've been asked to plug my friend Susan Hill's new website, so here goes: http://www.longbarnbooks.com/.

I've also been sent instructions on how to hyperlink which I'll do as soon as I learn the ropes.

And yesterday was the highest visitor numbers for this blog. Hooray for Robert McCrum.

Today sees the opening of the London Book Fair ( http://www.lbf-virtual.com/ ) if London Transport allows visitors to reach the exhibition hall in less than two hours.

Book Fairs tend to coincide with journalists scraping barrels for something bookish to write about. At a time when the industry is undergoing fundamental change, threats and opportunities the distinguished literary editor of the discriminating and excellent Observer newspaper has decided that the key issue is a list of the fifty most powerful people in British publishing -

http://books.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1723699,00.html.

It is an entertaining list and shows some insight and will no doubt generate debate - but it also underscores the narrow vision of most publishing commentators. With due respect to Amanda Ross (Richard and Judy  TV show), Caroline Ridding (buyer at the Tesco supermarket chain) and Diana Guy (Chair of the Competition Commission investigating the takeover of one bookshop chain by another) who are the top three in Robert's list this is simply nonsense. Each of them has a significant role in the book trade (mainly time limited) but it is patently absurd (inverted snobbery at play?) and plain silly to pretend they are the most powerful people in a trade which encompasses scholarship, education, literacy, technology and creativity.

Robert describes me (over-promoted at number 23) as provocative. I suspect he is trying to gain a similar reputation. He cannot possibly believe his list has any meaning at all. I don't even suppose it will sell many newspapers.

Yours ever

Pooter