A huge hole in the ground has appeared next to our King's Cross building. This is one of the first parts of Western Europe's largest building development. The hole will house an underground car park, a concert hall, a sculpture gallery, the Guardian newspaper, several restaurants and I don't know what else.

Most importantly it will ensure that Macmillan will be no more than two and a half hours from the centres of Paris and Brussels door to door by train. It won't necessarily make me any more sympathetic to Eurocracy and a 'federal' Europe but it should certainly be good for business and communications.

And this is what the hole will look like when completed in 2008 - the sooner the better.

Here in Britain there is little sense of global warming as Spring (let alone Summer) seems reluctant to arrive. However, next Tuesday evening will definitely presage a new season. It is the traditional dinner to celebrate the publication of the latest edition of Wisden Cricketers' Almanack and the start of another cricket season.

Cricket in England had been on a downward (some would say nihilistic) trend for a couple of decades and then last Summer a miracle...England won back The Ashes from a normally triumphant Australia. And suddenly, as the Almanack says, cricket became the new football with sell-out crowds, newly converted fans, and national excitement. Such an upsurge in interest initiated some changes in the venerable reference book. Perhaps the most obvious is that, alongside the traditional pocket-sized edition, there will appear a large-format edition. For the first time in my memory the articles have become easily readable and their content more accessible.

Another tradition is the naming of five players of the year and one 'Leading cricketer in the world' as written up in the Times. You'll have to wait a couple of days for the choice to be public.

Finally, on the subject of Wisden (for the time being at least and I should declare an interest as I am a director of the Wisden Group which owns cricinfo) I'd like to mention Matthew Engel, its editor. He has done a fantastic job as usual - a mixture of hard work, humour, scholarship, cunning - but he also suffered a personal tragedy which is best described by him. There is now a website dedicated to a fund set up in Laurie Engel's memory. Do go look at it.

We had a great party here in Kings Cross yesterday evening to celebrate the publication of the first six titles in the Macmillan New Writing fiction imprint. As followers of this blog or readers of the Guardian, Observer etc newspapers will know, our announcement of this initiative last year caused something of a stir amongst what the British call 'the chattering classes'. Thomas Hardy was going to turn in his grave because Macmillan was proposing not to rewrite an author's work if it wasn't up to scratch. Macmillan was sinking into becoming a 'vanity press' (in spite of the fact that we have rejected well over 99% of all submissions and absolutely do not accept money from authors wishing to be published). Macmillan's standards of editing would fall because the person running the scheme was a 'marketing guy' (actually that is one job Mike Barnard has never done and he is a damned sight more literate than many of the editors I see hanging around in the Groucho Club). And so on.

As a matter of courtesy we invited every journalist, literary agent and commentator who had written on the subject and expressed concern to a debate on new writing at the London College of Communications and to the party. Not one showed up in spite of both events being hugely successful with authors, publishers, printers and booksellers mixing and discussing new ways to stimulate creative writing. I suppose the commentators were too busy protecting their reputations and trying to spike other initiatives which might threaten their comfortable and elitist status quo.

Most of our industry is decent and professional but clearly not as unified and unbitchy as for instance beekeepers - a thousand great places to bee on the web! 

Fiona Mackenzie of Macmillan English Campus has been filling me in about the new MEC language CD-ROM which is published tomorrow:

"We wanted 'real' games created by real gamers not 'educational' games - we wanted people to play the games because they were fun and to use their English because they needed it in order to win. We didn't know what we were getting into. Games developers brainstorm ideas then they make the games up as they go along. We ELT editors and authors brainstorm then plan and organize - word sets, sentence structures, suitable language for different language levels. The gamers were helpful. If our words were too long, they changed them for shorter ones. If a sentence didn't fit, it was cut to fit. If there wasn't enough text they added more words ... any words. The alpha versions of the games were exciting. We never quite knew what text was going to emerge, explode, ooze or bounce on to the screen. We explained it wasn't quite that simple. They did listen. There was a game with past tenses of verbs: 'dry', 'cry' and 'try' have three red stars in the Macmillan English Dictionary - they are high frequency words for language learners. Imagine the pride of the ex-teacher mingled with the despair of the ELT editor as the joyfully apt and wondrously inappropriate 'beatify' slid into view.
 
We cracked it though - when a developer suddenly said, 'I know - we need to treat the English like we do the text for a website in French. We don't touch a thing.'
 
And when an ELT editor understands that the 'stickiness' of a game depends on the sensuous satisfaction of drawing an 'elastic band' round words as opposed to the tedium of clicking on dozens of individual letters and a gamer halts a discussion with the words, 'Pedagogically, this isn't right for our learners ... ', you're know you're on to something special.
 
Language Games CDROM is published by Macmillan English Campus on April 7th. It features over 150 English language games - about 54 hours of game-play for the average language learner. Combining real language practice with a sophisticated level of gaming challenge, it is great value at only £19.95 for the single user. For schools and institutions, a network edition is also available for 1-25 users.
 
To buy Language Games please visit the Macmillan English Campus website.

A very good friend of mine in the publishing business has always described himself as a science publisher rather than a publisher. This means he won't be harrassed by dinner party acquaintances into reading their new novel or discussing the latest novel from a Guatemalan genius. The idea of discussing science publishing nearly always moves the conversation on to soccer or supermodels immediately.

However, science publishing is probably the most vibrant part of the modern world of information dissemination and is a hugely successful British industry. At Macmillan we are blessed by being the publisher of a wide range of scientific journals with Nature at its head. By investing in quality and in technology we have been able to grow this business in partnership with learned societies, scientists, advertisers and subscribers. The business is global of course but there is a local dimension too and we are announcing today the formation of new operations in India, Latin America and Spain.

This is yet another investment in what we do best and we have hired the best people to help us do it.

Libraries are part of global culture, as British as fish and chips, as American as apple pie and as Jewish as chopped liver. I've known Tim Coates from the time he was Managing Director of the then up-market, fiercely independent and anarchic up-and-coming Waterstone's bookshop chain. He is currently involved in a highly personal campaign to encourage the British Government and local authorities to spend library budgets on books - a simple, obvious but difficult objective. Not everyone agrees with Tim's in-your-face approach to campaigning but at the very least he has made the topic unignorable. I asked him to write a guest blog for me and here it is:

"Half the management in this country is public sector. The rules are different: income does not depend on judgment, efficiency or perfomance; cash is available; there is no such thing as bankruptcy and nor are there the disciplines, anxieties, skills and systems which are used to avoid it. Employment is secure and very well paid. Projects thrive on persuasive plans but rarely on actual outcomes. To a private sector manager, the regime is unfamiliar.

We have become used to the idea that only a small portion of charitable donations reach their intended recipients; we should get used to the idea that the great part of the money we thought was for public service  will never reach any public beneficiary. We live in an economy which is the travelling equivalent of a crowded roundabout. Huge amounts of public funds travel on a journey which goes nowhere in an unpleasant and wasteful manner.

For seven years I have studied the public library service in both central and local government where most of the operation is managed. This is a £1.2bn pa operation which has no accounts, no boards of directors, no planning or budgeting, no measurement of performance and no management of the kind a garage mechanic would recognise. It is a disaster from the tip of its branches to the lengths of it ancient roots. Use of the service has fallen to half its rather successful level of twenty years ago and no one can even agree whether that is a good thing or a bad one. No junior manager learns the basic skills of "yes" or "no" from his senior- because he, or she  never learned those skills either. The operation is a national disgrace and nobody even knows.

We have an extremely and potentially devastating problem of the economy in this country and it is the management of public sector activities. We worry about political incompetence, global warming and the management of our soccer team. We should be sensible and start worrying about the management of public services. That really is frightening."

As March comes to an end we've seen the Nibbies, an annual publishing event of acquired taste and little import (although I'm told it is at the heart of our industry which worries me rather), come and go; India squeeze a one-day victory over England at cricket, and the UK Competition Commission give provisional clearance for the takeover of the Ottakar's bookshop chain by HMV.

April kicks off with a literary question. Are there more people who want to write a book than who want to read one? There is a a three-hour debate at the London College of Communications which looks like it will be quite lively. If you have a moment I'd recommend you look in. You can find more details here.

PS Back to the Nibbies, it is clearly excellent getting TV coverage for books and authors and this must sell books. My back of an envelope calculation suggests the industry has to sell an additional two million books to cover the costs of the televised dinner. Hmmmm?

‘Blogs are the new phone in modern society’, according to online coffee retailer Boca Java. In a report issued by the company it states that there are now around 50 million blogs on the Web – with the blogging community expanding by around 65,000 a day. So significant a group is this new breed that the company has decided to target bloggers as a consumer market with a new line of coffee called Blogger’s Blends. They're holding a contest where bloggers get to design and name a new blend of coffee. The climax of the contest is a prize - a  free year of coffee. Certainly some form of energy-giving drug is required to keep up a blog, but my efforts pale into insignificance when compared to those of the anonymous Iraqi woman whose blog, Baghdad Burning, has been nominated for a literary prize. The blog, started in 2003, recounts how the Iraq war has affected the daily lives of ordinary citizens and has been nominated for the most valuable award for non-fiction – the Samuel Johnson Prize. Baghdad Burning is being published by the independent publishers Marion Boyars and is among 19 candidates for the award. Other contenders include Untold Stories by Alan Bennett, After The Victorians by AN Wilson, and a biography of Mrs Beeton by Kathryn Hughes.

Some things serve to cheer me up. A few blogs ago I wrote that Mike Barnard had written a book, Transparent Imprint, about the fun and games he had setting up Macmillan New Writing to the derision of many in the literary world. Well, the first review has come out on the Grumpy Old Bookman blog and its a humdinger. So congratulations Mike and two fingers to the detractors. And to see the novels themselves go to the MNW website.