Just back from two days on the East Coast of the USA. First stop Boston for meetings at Bedford St Martins where we discussed the rapidly changing US college textbook market. As in most markets, students are demanding more and more and are willing (or able) to pay less and less. However, what is clear is that how we deliver information for students is becoming almost as important as what we deliver - and that the winners will be those who innovate, learn and change fast.

One lesson I learned and I am happy to share with you - don't go to Anthony's Pier 4 restaurant. Apparently it was good 25 years ago - but they don't seem to have adapted.

Second stop New York and meetings with our cousinly trade publishing houses. I do love America. When you get a bestseller you REALLY get a bestseller. I'm not at liberty to disclose how many copies Farrar, Straus and Giroux have sold of The World is Flat and in any event I've already forgotten but it sure makes a difference.

But for me the most personal sales figure is that yesterday this blog exceeded 1000 (1152 to be precise) visitors for the first time. I feel just like an author when  a bookshop places a re-order.

And whilst in self-congratulatory mood, some months ago I rabbitted on about Lonesome George, a bizarre but IMHO brilliant book about a celibate giant tortoise called George. Well, I'm not alone. The Guardian reviewer loved it too and the headline, The Fire in Lonesome George's Loins, says it all.

Our international sales teams acknowledge no frontiers: Charles Jenkins, International Sales Manager at Palgrave Macmillan has just sent me these dispatches after his recent trip to the Kurdistan region in Northern Iraq..

"After overcoming considerable logistical and security challenges, the first International Book Fair to take place in Iraq for nearly 30 years went ahead last week in Erbil, the administrative capital of the Iraq Kurdistan region which is located in the North of Iraq, not far from Mosul.  Held in a specially constructed exhibition hall in a beautifully landscaped park, amid tight security, it was formally opened by the newly-appointed Minister of Higher Education from the Kurdish Regional Government(KRG).

It had been hoped the President of Iraq, Jalal Talabany, the first non-Arab President of an Arab country would attend, but his visit was called off at the last minute for security reasons.   Many officials from various Iraqi and KRG Ministries were in attendance along with representatives from every University and library in the country, starved for so long of good quality English and local language books and materials for the educational sector.

The Book Fair provided an excellent opportunity for foreign and Arabic academic publishers and suppliers to display and sell their latest textbooks, library books and materials.  The Iraqi government had budgeted about £700,000 for the purchase of books relating to Higher Education in the English Language; cash sales were brisk, and in the purchasing frenzy one could witness the unusual sight of boxes of books being hauled away in supermarket trolleys by librarians, academics, students and private individuals, under the watchful eye of the ubiquitous, gun-toting Peshmerga soldiers..theft was not a problem at this Fair!  Most popular subject areas included medicine, engineering, sciences(particularly geology), English language/linguistics/literature and business.

Kurdish National flags fluttered proudly at the entrance to the Fair, something which would not have been possible before Saddam’s overthrow.  The event was widely heralded as a great success and one that is hoped will become established as an important annual event in the educational and cultural development of the country in the future.

No other foreign publisher’s representatives attended.  Many were not permitted by their companies to visit or, if they were, were unwilling to do so because of the perceived security risks, despite Erbil being much safer in reality than most of the rest of the country provided sensible precautions are taken. The US monitor all commercial and military flights in and out of Iraqi airspace and two American F16 Jets were in close radio contact with my plane from Amman ‘guiding’ us in to Erbil airport.  It’s still very much uncharted territory from a business travel perspective and it was in fact the first time these particular Royal Jordanian pilots had ever flown into Erbil! 

Erbil, believed by many to be the oldest continuously-inhabited city in the world is definitely ‘back on the map’ and eager to reintegrate itself into the international business community."

Further to my Asia posting on Sunday, it was serendipitous that The Times ran an article yesterday, ‘How to eat peas and then outsell Dan Brown’ featuring Macmillan Education and FLTRP’s New Standard English (NSE) series of text books for primary school children that has sold 105 million copies in China. NSE has set a new standard for English teaching text books in the region due to a radical new approach using cartoons, songs, funny stories and games which are engaging a new generation of school children in China.

I feel as if there's been simply too much on this blog about the UK. For Macmillan the UK represents about 15% of our people and about the same proportion of our sales. Of course it's important and the issues affecting the UK quite often have global implications but my mind turned elsewhere - to Asia where we have seen and are continuing to enjoy exceptional growth across a range of activities and territories.

Earlier this year we launched a web landing page for these operations which you can find here. I'll mention just four of the many new initiatives.

Just over a year ago Pan Macmillan Asia opened its doors as a sales and distribution agency for all Macmillan and Holtzbrinck USA and for a number of highly successful third-party publishers such as Rodale and Granta. The next step is rapidly to build our service for Australian publishers who rightly see Asia as a natural export market for them.

A little earlier we established a mainland Chinese publishing operation with the top Chinese publisher FLTRP. Our joint textbook programme, New Standard English, already has sales of more than 50 million copies a year and is growing alongside a raft of other initiatives.

Macmillan Production Asia has sourced print for Macmillan companies in Asia for decades but only recently have we offered this service to non-Macmillan companies. The year has begun with excellent new business in Germany, Greece, Mexico, and Australia. And it's not just books - MPA can supply globes, diaries, MP3 Players and deckchairs.

And finally Nature Asia Pacific which is launching new journal services in Chinese, Korean and Japanese; working with scientific and academic societies; building websites for better dissemination of both Western and Asian research and helping industrial companies comunicatte with their markets.

There is a great calypso, London is the place for me, but Asia is where it's happening.

This quote from my French bank statement may make sense to someone with better French than me - but I've been completely baffled this morning.

Si votre compte courant à été ouvert avant le 28/01/2003, sans établissement d'une convention de compte, vous pouvez obtenir un project de convention et proceder à sa signature en vous adressant à votre agence habituelle.

In the world of  British books last week's London Book Fair event overshadowed much else. The outcome - the existing good managers of the London Book Fair announced that next year the Fair will move back to a more central location - is excellent for most exhibitors. Unfortunately the catalysts for this change of mind, the team from the Frankfurt Book Fair, were thus excluded. It was a complicated series of events with a number of parties and I'm sure many people will feel let down, misled and double-crossed.

The coverage in the Independent newspaper -  The World Cup has not even started yet but already it's England 1, Germany 0 - was typically chauvinistic and anti-German. It's strange how the most liberal British commentators become quietly xenophobic where Germany is involved.

I attended the annual Booksellers Association conference earlier this week. There were a number of highlights including Richard Dawkins' attack on religion in his new book The God Delusion based on the TV series The Root of all Evil? Go buy the book when it comes out in the Autumn.

There were discussions on whether or not to print prices on books, whether or not the London Book Fair should be in Earl's Court or Docklands, whether all publishers should be buried alive for their iniquitous discount policies or just some of them, and so on.

The most important thing from my point of view related to the future of independent (and not so independent) bookselling in a digital environment.

Nobody doubts that the book has a future and that booksellers will continue to  find a decent market for fiction and popular non-fiction. However, some areas of publishing have already moved to a completely new distribution mechanism which eliminates the role of the traditional bookseller. The first movers were scientific and legal publishers, rapidly followed by business information providers. Schools business could be hugely affected by the BBC's plans for a digital curriculum. Right now reference books and travel guides are moving rapidly to a web-only model. Other areas of non-fiction, particularly high-level academic works, will follow.

One can certainly paint a picture of doom for the small book retailer. But I came away from the conference convinced otherwise. Provided publishers digitise their material and make it available to all at a price. Provided booksellers are willing to take risks and learn new skills. Provided that authors allow fast and effective re-use of their copyright works. I believe the small bookseller can build a profitable and growing business selling traditional books on the web and still serving their local community; building deeper communities of interest among readers; building digital delivery websites for text and audio books. The more book retailers enter this business the more we and our customers will all be protected from the dangers of monopolistic or oligopolistic distribution channels.

In Britain and Ireland we are hugely fortunate in having an organisation which can facilitate this future and who have proved its worth time and time again. Now the BA needs to encourage all its members to seek advice in order to harness the potential of these powerful new digitalia (as a colleague calls it).

Keeping a blog is bringing out all my trainspotter tendencies. For instance, I spend a probably unhealthy amount of my time looking at my web statistics to see how many hits the blog has had, and so on. The bit that really fascinates me though is the referring searches that bring web surfers to the blog. A cursory look today shows the usual Google searches for 'Charkin' and even for 'Charkin blog', which just goes to prove that new-fangled ideas like 'viral marketing' really do work. But it also reveals the interests so common to us all right now - for example the number of searches on 'e-books' or 'digital publishing'. Perhaps more interestingly it conclusively proves that cricket is the new football with searches for 'Wisden' rating highly. One lone search saddened me to my boots, though - the one looking for 'Elsevier mission statement.' But I guess the most disappointed searchers will have been all those looking for 'condom.'