RajAT commented on an earlier posting here (27 May) that:

'The most connected country in the world that is Korea is spending least time reading books. Now there lies the juice. Does this mean that internet is going to kill the books as we know. Has it become an outmoded means of communicating information.'

He goes on to quote from Jeff Jarvis of the Buzz Machine about some of the problems with books:

• They are frozen in time without the means of being updated and corrected.
• They have no link to related knowledge, debates, and sources.
• They create, at best, a one-way relationship with a reader.
• They try to teach readers but don’t teach authors.
• They tend to be too damned long because they have to be long enough to be books.
• They are expensive to produce.
• They depend on scarce shelf space.
• They depend on blockbuster economics.
• They can’t afford to serve the real mass of niches.
• They are subject to gatekeepers’ whims.
• They aren’t searchable.
• They aren’t linkable.
• They have no metadata.
• They carry no conversation.
• They are thrown out when there’s no space for them anymore.

Of course there are plenty of positives about books. We'd better make sure our marketplace understands - or we'd better address some of the book's shortcomings using technology.

For those who don't know (or don't care) Gordon Brown is the Chancellor of the Exchequer in the UK (Finance Minister in most other countries). He is trying to become Prime Minister and as a consequence spends a deal of time sucking up to foreign heads of state and cuddles a lot of African babies in order to show what agreat guy he is. He also wishes to maintain a reputation as a 'prudent' chancellor and a scourge of tax dodgers.

His main attack on 'tax dodgers' has been to steal billions of pounds from pension funds thus discouraging prudent saving and personal responsibility.

His latest attack is described in the Sunday Times today. Essentially he seems to have decided that authors' agents are not a tax-deductible business expense. Now I am one of the first people to decry the role of the literary agent in contemporary publishing but to pretend they are not a legitimate business expense is absurd. I'm sure this tax-raising nonsense will fail but it is symptomatic of current British politicians to think they might get away with it. As they say in the Drones Club, harrumph.

When we launched Macmillan New Writing a couple of months ago one of the authors, Suroopa Mukherjee, came to London with her husband for the launch. You can see and listen to her talking about her book here.

The book (along with the others in the series) is selling well on the back of excellent reviews and by present-day standards reasonable stock in bookshops.

The series was greeted with varying degrees of enthusiasm in the British media but I think this article in India's leading newspaper Daily News and Analysis is the best balanced.

Incidentally, if you go to the MNW website you'll see that a number of the titles are showing as out of stock. We have had to reprint just about every one - but new stock will be available soon and there are copies in bookshops - both independents and chains.

This week has been ever more focussed on matters digital. Bookseller concerns, librarian concerns, authorial concerns, publisher concerns.

The wiring diagram below is 'like a light in the jungle which merely increases confusion'. But perhaps confusion is the correct response. Have a good weekend everybody.

A new month means I can't resist checking out the number of visitors to this blog. Here we go:

January 9036

February 8492

March 18724

April 19257

May 22868

I suspect numbers will fall during the (Northern Hemisphere) Summer months as people rush off to their Tuscan villas...but you never know. The public is unpredictable.

The visit by our German bookseller and publisher colleagues finished yesterday. I'm not quite sure what they made of the British book trade scene as they were treated to excellent but not altogether consistent discussions with leaders of bookshop chains, Internet gurus and retail market experts. I think the overwhelming theme is one of confusion and complexity. Finding a way through will require good will as well as foresight - and with profit margins for most participants in the general book supply chain very low good will tends to take second place to achieving budget.

It seems that the deal is done although has the fat lady sung? Check out BBC news.

I calculate that HMV has paid £35m less than they originally offered. This reduction was caused by a deterioration in Ottakar's trading between the original offer and now. The delay was caused by the referral of the deal to the Competition Commission. I supect that the whole affair has cost HMV (and everyone else) a huge amount of money in legal and economist fees (not to mention management time) but at least HMV shareholders have a better deal than they might have done.

Let's now hope that the book trade can get back to selling more books more economically and that the lessons of this sorry affair are well and truly learnt.

I've been blessed by good bosses throughout my career - honestly!One of the very best was Dan Davin who was responsible for hiring me to Oxford University Press in 1975. Apart from teaching me most of what I know about scholarly publishing he also introduced me to the expatriate New Zealand community in Oxford and London. To this day I marvel at the creative, literary and sporting output of that tiny country. Not only that but in the Macmillan world New Zealand is always at or near the top of our league of best performing businesses. How come? Because we have the very best people. I asked our NZ Managing Director, David Joel, to tell us what's happening over there.

Dispatches from New Zealand

With the advent of the blog we seem to have mixed the boundaries of the formal business and the personal. At work the perfunctory “Good Morning” may be enough without giving away all the personal issues or delight in our lives –the blog and perhaps the internet seem to have changed that. If I mentioned in a blog I was really disappointed in the Super 14 final (a Rugby Union competition between Australia, South Africa and New Zealand) was held in such foggy conditions in Christchurch last Saturday it was as hopeless as the “mist” spectacle.you may not be surprised. If I mentioned this in a business report I might be considered loopy. Of course the final was between two New Zealand teams. I can tell you the failure of the Rugby spectacle was more than made up for on Sunday afternoon at a Beethoven concert conducted by my brother’s son which was spectacular. The soloist for the Violin Concerto was nothing but brilliant. I have about 8 CDs of the Beethoven Violin Concerto by different violinists (I can’t seem to get the Campoli one though) and I have to believe this young man was nothing but the best. Or is it that a live performance cannot be beaten by a CD? In any case Eugene Lee is a violinist to look out for.  Beethoven’s 5^th was excellent too.

On a more mundane note the recent NZ budget here was criticized because it did not offer personal income tax cuts. It was named the Bondi budget because the place to obtain a tax cut is in Australia (Oz is a three hour flight away and is not joined to Auckland by the Sydney Harbour Bridge as some who live in the Northern Hemsiphere believe) where they recently announced tax cuts in their budget. The prime NZ budget announcement was preempted from the budget night because a government courier had leaked the proposed budget announcement of the deregulation of Telecom two weeks early to Telecom themselves. Because it is the most significant NZ listed company Telecom felt they had to let the government know they had this information. So much for NZ Government security! To think we might obtain better ADSL prices and speed by deregulation? Why am I so cynical about central government’s ability to deliver?

In the book publishing industry the big news is that Penguin are moving their distribution to Australia in a few months along with Hachette Livre. The plane might take three hours but airfreight seems to take a week and a ship a month. At Macmillan NZ we should be smiling as we are in the process of installing a mezzanine in our warehouse which will give us 50% more floor space. We will be the only publisher/distrbutor in NZ which stocks tertiary titles.

Richard Charkin astutely pointed out before we put in the mezzanine we should just reduce the stock by half – we could reduce it totally if we distributed from Australia. Only time will tell which publishers are making the right move. In the meantime we are going to play on the concept our books are sent from NZ and not packed by people in Australia (You’ll note the rivalry between the countries does not stop on the Rugby field).

The other issue in New Zealand is the price of petrol (we are part of the global community after all) The price has risen 70% this year and we now pay about $1.80 per litre.(60p) This might not be so bad compared with the UK but it is a real shock to us all here.

We are blaming this for our difficulty meeting expected sales as we can’t seem to find another reason. It would be stretching credibility to believe that the demise of our 5c piece (sixpence in the old currency) was the reason. Surely everyone realizes $29.95 is about twenty dollars whereas $30.00 is thirty dollars without dispute?  

It has been said those of us who live in Auckland know the price of everything but the value of nothing. Well I paid the price for the new Blackberry model 8700 in the belief the irritating button on the side would be remedied (and it has) but they didn’t tell me the screen backlight would go off after not more than 2 minutes and I could see nothing unless I pressed a button – so much for my nonchalance in meetings now.  New models are supposed to be an advancement in critical areas but the new Blackberry demonstrates this is not always the case. I’m still not disposing of the old model yet. I thought I might put it on Trademe (NZ’s eBay). I could give you a blog on the story of TradeMe and NZ’s Gullivers Travels - in fact I have just thought of about 100 things I could blog on about but who would be interested?

Greetings to all from New Zealand.

As I mentioned a couple of blogs ago we are welcoming colleagues and friends from the book trade in Germany this week. Kathrin Berger from Stuttgart is the key organiser. Because things have gone so smoothly she has found the time to guest blog for me. Over to you, Kathrin.

We arrived yesterday and so far my spirit has lifted - London is always lively and overwhelming. There is no other city in Europe where you meet so many different cultures. We went for a walk in the city and for we Germans it was great because all the shops were open on a Sunday!

We're staying at a pretty hotel with flowers everywhere in the room - that's what we call typical English. Today it is a holiday in the UK but nevertheless we will start our conference. I am really curious what we will learn about the UK book market and the current trends there.

Tonight we will meet some authors at the Chelsea Arts Club - Clare Francis, Peter James, and Wilbur Smith and then tomorrow real work trying to get to grips with the absurdities and charms of English-language bookselling.

The joy of electronic publishing is that new ideas can sometimes be turned into real businesses without huge capital investments. Take for instance Exact Editions. I quote from their description of themselves:

Exact Editions was founded in the summer of 2005 by Tim Bruce, Adam Hodgkin and Daryl Rayner. The founders have backgrounds in software, publishing and marketing and they are all veterans of the first wave of web publishing. Their aim with Exact Editions is to build a web service which works for publishers and readers to make magazines as useful, simple and pleasurable as any other web service. The starting point is that a magazine on the web can be exactly as it is on the page. The web page should look like the magazine and it should be there when you search for it. No downloads, no flash, no ‘re-purposing’, no messing around. Just straightforward click and search, point and browse.

The founders are all friends of mine and so I should declare an interest but it seems to me that they are doing everything absolutely right. A straightforward business model, a clean website, effective software functionality, a genuine market - and low overheads to run the business. Do try out some of the specimen issues and see what you think.

If they succeeed (which I think they will) they will have done the magazine industry a huge favour in expanding their readership internationally as well as to their core domestic market. I'm not sure what Americans will make of the Spectator.