The Publishers Association has just published its Statistics Yearbook for 2005. It's well worth getting a copy if only to marvel at the divergence between popular perception and reality.

Next week Macmillan is welcoming a group of top German booksellers to London to learn what's going on in the UK and perhaps to avoid some of the British mistakes. And I'm hoping we can learn something from them. As part of the preparation we have been digging in to swathes of statistics on consumer behaviour in relation to reading etc. I thought I'd share some of the nuggets.

In Germany Internet users have increased from 7% of the population in 1997 to 58% now. The over 60 year olds have increased from 0 in 1997 to 18% now.

In UK Internet advertising now represents 7% of total media spend up 73% on the previous year.

In USA 27% of online users buy or sell in online auction sites.

On average across the world people spend 6.5 hours a week reading. The most of amount time spent reading is in India (10.7 hours), the least Korea (3.1 hours). UK is very near the bottom at 5.3 hours, Germany and USA a little higher at 5.7 hours.

The Chinese listen to radio less than any other nation (2.1 hours a week), Argentina the most (20.8 hours).

On average people now spend more time on the Internet for leisure (not work) than reading - 8.9 vs 6.5 hours. Mexico uses the Intenet for leisure least (6.3 hours) and Taiwan the most (12.6 hours).

Internet use reduces the time people have for reading by around 20%.

40% of Europeans do not read books.

More people use the Internet for leisure than read books in the developed world.

And people wonder why publishers are spending so much time and effort on digital developments...

Three years ago Nature Publishing Group decided to invest heavily in clinical medical publishing. We were well-established in science, particularly biology, and thus our medical focus was on the scientific rather than clinical end of health care. Of course clinical medicine is a very heavily published area and there are many very old and well-established competitors.  (I was the editor of Oxford Medical Publications back in 1975 - and a great job it was.) If we were to succeed in this field we'd have to do things a bit differently and better. Peter Ashman who has driven the project from its inception tells us a bit about it:

'About two and a half years ago, Nature Publishing Group made our first foray into Nature-branded medical publishing with the launch of the first four Nature Clinical Practice (NCP) journals. Since then we've launched a further four with more in the pipeline.

Quite apart from the achievement of launching eight journals in 12 months - an incredible feat in itself - one of the great successes of the Nature Clinical Practice series has been our ability to attract some of the world's leading medical specialists and opinion leaders as Editors-in-Chief and on to Advisory Board members. Doctors such as Vincent T DeVita (NCP Oncology) and Valentin Fuster (NCP Cardiovascular Medicine) are frequently approached by publishers asking them to endorse or to lend their weight to some medical publishing project or other. For NPG, we have been delighted by the willingness of so many key global figures to embrace the NCP concept and to give so freely of their time and knowledge.

One of our Advisory Board members is the pioneering heart surgeon Professor Sir Magdi Yacoub who, despite 'retiring' in 2001 is still a major influencer in the world of heart transplantation. An example of his continuing influence is the recent case of 12 year old Hannah Clarke who suffered from cardiomyopathy (a condition in which the heart can inflame to double its size before, frequently, giving up) on whom Professor Yacoub performed a heart transplant in 1995. During the operation Yacoub took the unplanned decision that, rather than remove the girl's heart, he would leave it in situ and place the donor heart on top - a 'piggy-back' procedure.

This turned out to be a visionary decision as, ten years on, doctors discovered that Hannah's body was rejecting the donor heart and it needed to be removed. Doctors called on Professor Yacoub to come out of retirement and advise on what to do. The decision was taken that Hannah's own heart, having had a 10-year rest, could now be re-started - the operation was undertaken and has proved to be a resounding success with Hannah now being able to stop taking her anti-rejection drugs. Had Professor Yacoub removed Hannah's heart in 1995 as was the norm for this type of condition ten years ago - Hannah would probably be dead by now. You can read more on this heart-warming story on the BBC site and here at CORDIS.

It's an honour for us at Nature to be working with people who make such a difference to our lives.'

I've been waiting for an opportunity to use my favourite film quote of all time. There were one or two moments in my sojourn at the Publishers Association and quite a few at Macmillan but they're not bloggable. So I'm going to give it to you anyway. I suspect it only works in English, so apologies to non-native speakers. It comes from one of the great non-arthouse films, Carry on Cleo (original idea by William Shakespeare), and was spoken by the brilliant and camp Kenneth Williams playing Julius Caesar as the plotters encircle. The line was lifted from an earlier series, Take it from here, by Frank Muir and Denis Norden.

And the quote?

Infamy, infamy, they've all got it in for me.

As a commentator points out, it gives 'Et tu, Brute' decent competition.

I can't help admire the Boersenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels , Germany’s association for the book trade, which yesterday launched its ‘full-text search online’ project. This collaborative initiative to develop a digital content storage and delivery platform, in which all German booksellers and publishers will be invited to participate, is a forward-thinking approach for sure.  Germany certainly looks like it's wisely gearing up for an increasingly digital future.   

Of course I am particularly pleased that  MPS Technologies and Hamburg-based sister company HGV, both Holtzbrinck companies, have been chosen as development partners for the project. MPS Technologies and HGV launched their ‘digital warehouse’ concept, BookStore, at the Frankfurt Book Fair last year. Since then a prototype has been developed and demonstrated to many publishers in the UK, Germany and the USA. A beta site will be available in late June. A bespoke version of the BookStore platform will be developed for the Bórsenverein which will be offered to publishers across Germany and launched at the Frankfurt Book Fair 2006. 

Yet one more step in publishers and booksellers opening their eyes to the imperative of adapting to a digital future. 

Yesterday saw our twice a year board meeting. We reviewed last year's results, first quarter 2006 performance and our projections for the rest of the year. Or that's what we pretended to do. Actually it was an opportunity to collect our thoughts and focus on what really matters - where do we want to take the business, where are the opportunities for growth, where are the pratfalls, where the genuine strategic threats, are we investing enough in people, publishing, are we taking enough risks? It reminded me of the enormous breadth of the world of Macmillan - children's publishing, learned journals, software development, science, Picador, Papua New Guinea, Sao Paulo, Greece, On-line learning, site licences for academic content, books on memory sticks, online communities, mass-market paperbacks, growth in Russia, support for African education, sourcing slates from China, new authors versus existing blockbusters, building blogs for authors, developing sales analysis tools, serving US college publishers with text processing, selling New Zealand-developed literacy schemes to the USA and so on. All this is what makes publishing so exciting, interesting and fulfilling.

And meanwhile the Google debate continues and we have a new concept, the literati/technorati divide which you can read about at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/21/AR2006052101349_pf.html.

Incidentally a googly (from which the great organisation may have derived its name - OED please check) is a delivery by a right arm spin bowler which to a right hand batsman appears as if it will spin from leg to off, however, spins in the opposite direction. This may well be the problem with Google too.

I was going to do a piece on Google today following an article entitled Scan This Book by Kevin Kelly in last Sunday's (May 14) New York Times Magazine which was an apologia for Google and its plans to digitise all the world's knowledge (without asking permission from copyright holders). The problem is that the article (of May 14) is now more than seven days old and the NYT charges for access to its archive. I couldn't be bothered to go to the hassle of paying - hence no in-depth review (which is probably a relief to you all). I was slightly pissed off at being asked to pay.

Nevertheless thank goodness the NYT company IS charging. The Times is trying to build an economically sustainable model to help pay for its present and future investments in web technology and editoprial standards and they are protecting copyright by establishing that content has a value.

It is strange that the NYT has adopted a strictly commercial and proper arrangement when it comes to protecting its own copyright - and yet it sees no inconsistency in supporting 'cool' Google which appear to be bent on undermining the very sort of commercial arrangements being developed by book publishers.

It is really a very strange world where those who are arrogant or mad enough to think they can build a 'perfect search engine (which) would be like the mind of God' (Google co-founder, Sergey Brin) are treated as cool and honourable and publishers such as Random House, Bloomsbury, Reed Elsevier, Blackwell, Macmillan etc are regarded as dinosaurs when they spend money and creativity developing new ways to support their authors and excite their readers. Go figure.

PS I've now found a link to the KK article. Enjoy but treat with care - it's full of assertions about Google's 'do no evil' sentiment. Never forget that Google is a huge ($90m revenue) public company whose job is to maximise returns to its shareholders.

Yesterday I was able to visit one of the most beautiful places in England in the Spring. Being England, it rained on and off. I have also been experimenting with loading picture files and so I hope this works.

Paul Getty, an American but an anglophile, fell in love with cricket and decided to create a cricket ground exactly as it should be in the grounds of his estate in the Chiltern Hills. The Wisden Group has been allowed to host an annual tournament there and I was lucky enough to be invited.

Here is a picture of the ground. You will notice covers on the pitch, an attempt to keep the playing area dry. In the background is the pavilion.

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This next shot is the scorebox which is beautiful and traditional in the sense that the numbers are too small to be seen from the spectators' area. Squinting at the score is one of the pleasures of the game.

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And this picture shows the team lists for the tournament itself. The whole world as understood by the British Empire is pretty well represented. I was playing for the West Indies and we suffered a humiliating defeat to India. And Australia beat England just to make things worse.

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Cricket may not be the most universally comprehensible sport but at least it is played in beautiful surroundings.

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.