This comes to you from a rainy  and grey South-West France. I've been checking out some links which I'd like to share.

First an interview with Stephen Page, Chief Executive of Faber and my successor as President of the Publishers Association - and the best thing to happen to independent publishing in years.

And then feast on an interview with Tom Turvey who is in charge of Google's Booksearch program. Tom is the acceptable face of Google and has had to put up with all sorts of  publisher attacks beginning at the 2005 PA AGM debate and continuously since then. He's still smiling which says a lot for his character and commitment.

And whilst on character and commitment I forgot to mention that the mother of Laurie Engel,then known as Hilary Davies, for Macmillan for ten years until 1991 as editorial director of Sidgwick & Jackson and then Pan.

And finally, if you want to set yourself a difficult task which will bring cheer try to track down a Costa Rican group called el Cafe Chorale and in particular the track Ojala que llueva cafe. I'm listening  to it right now and the skies have already brightened.

The weather shows no signs of improving in Britain in spite of the beginning of the cricket season.

As I mentioned here earlier in the week, the latest edition of Wisden is published this week, and is the 143rd consecutive annual since the first one in 1864. This is a remarkable achievement, especially when you consider that it came out in every year of both world wars, despite there being virtually no cricket played anywhere between 1915 and 1918, and wartime paper shortages as well.

This morning's leader in the Times described the Italian election as an Italian fudge. I think cream buns might be the more appropriate confectionery as the contenders sling insults at each other like clowns at the circus. Clearly this non-result is bad for Italy and the Italian economy.Equally clearly the German result last year did nothing for European economic liberalisation. And Chriac's pathetic climb-down yesterday was equally unhelpful.

These were the down-sides of some political stalemates. But the joy of all these results is that they confirm the intrinsic differences between the nation states of Europe and make federalisation even more obviously absurd. Gloria Italia.

On a more bookish theme I was amazed to discover that Oxfam in the UK sells £60m (roughly a third of Ottakar's total book sales) of used books a year through 750 outlets of which 112 are book and music specialists. It's great that so much money is raised to help alleviate famine and disease in the developing world but if I were a second-hand bookseller I'd be pretty worried.

And here is a link to an article by commentator Clive Keble.

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.