Before getting into the main part of today's blog I thought you might enjoy this link to the distinguished medical journal Annals of Internal Medicine. The guy on the left has clearly fallen asleep while reading the journal resting on his chest. You may notice that the journal's title has been grayed out. The journal in question is our very own Nature Clinical Practice Endocrinology and one wonders why someone bothered to gray out its title. Because they don't want to publicise another publisher's journal? Can you imagine the hordes of people who might cancel their subscription to Annals in order to subscribe to Endocrinology because of the picture? Or because they think we might sue them for implying that our journal has sedative side-effects? Who knows? The email telling me about this was simply headed 'weird' and indeed it is.

From time to time (perhaps too often for the more light-hearted) I have mentioned our new investment in BookStore. It is progressing well with really encouraging discussions with publishers, retailers, wholesalers, and printers in a number of countries. When we decided to set it up we wondered whether it would be better to wait until the whole book trade had agreed on standards for the delivery of digital information. It would really make sense for there to be a standard but speed is also important and we all know how long it takes any industry to agree on anything. However, a reader of this blog wrote to me about all this and as he was an author at our sister company St. Martin's Press and as he seems to make sense here's what he has to say:

Helpful URLs: OpenReader Consortium (openreader.org), dotReader (dotReader.com), a mock-up of dotReader (http://www.dotreader.com/site/?q=node/45), why dotReader stands out (http://www.dotreader.com/site/?q=node/18), dotReader's Dorothy Thompson connection (http://www.dotreader.com/site/?q=node/17), and OSoft (osoft.com).

Our print sourcing office in Hong Kong, MPAL, is challenged by its publisher customers every day. The latest is a request to quote for the delivery of textbooks to Sulaymaniyah. It is just possible that not everyone knows where Sulaymaniyah is and so I have pasted in a map of the area. You may have to move the map around a bit - it's more or less due East of Kirkuk.You will notice the preponderance of neighbouring towns with (destroyed) beneath their name. As I say, we face challenges every day.

A colleague has just reminded me of the apposite motto of the New York postal service:

Literary prizes always generate a pile of back-biting among the gliterati of the book world. Whilst biting and scratching backs we often forget to say thank you. So here it is - THANK YOU ORANGE FOR SUPPORTING WOMEN'S FICTION.

We at Macmillan were disappointed that Carrie Tiffany did not win. This disappointment was soon moderated by the pleasure of Zadie Smith deservedly winning with On Beauty. But general book publishing is strange and complicated. The German edition of On Beauty will be published in August by one of our sister companies in Germany - Kiepenheuer & Witsch. White Teeth and the Autograph Man were also published in German by a sister company, Droemer Knaur. So hooray for Zadie.

People say that publishers must be optimists. Searching for good news like this is a symptom of that optimism.

I talk a lot about innovation in publishing. It's very hard to define but you know it when you see it. Take a look at the Think Publishing website and see if you agree.

And finally another piece of innovation, Nature Network Boston, an example of how scientific publishing is moving away from a content-supply business towards becoming a facilitator of communications for scientists.

It was not so long ago that Google was revered as a whiter than white crusader against evil, an upholder of right against might, of menschlichkeit against corporatism. That image has changed. Has it changed permanently?

They have managed to alienate nearly all of the publishing industry. A colleague has now alerted me to Bob Cringely writing on the PBS website. It appears that now they have pissed off their advertising clients. 'Click fraud' is an obvious and very dangerous development. Google seems ill-equipped or unwilling to deal with it. The very basis of their prosperity and credibility is being challenged.

They are also bloody awful at communication. Weren't they meant to be helping the world not creating a job's-worth humourless soviet e-bureaucracy?

And on the subject of change, one of the key planks of scholarly research is peer review. The advent of the Internet is potentially opening up possibilities for wider, deeper, more open review. Nature is undertaking trials and running a debate. Even if you are not a scientist I do recommend you check this out. It is a sign of more change but a change which is being thoroughly road-tested. Google, please note.

Tonight I am attending the awards ceremony for the Orange Prize for the woman who, in the opinion of the judges, has written the best, eligible full-length novel in English. Our shortlisted author is Carrie Tiffany. Fingers crossed for her this evening.

And back to Nature. The editor, the esteemed Dr Phil Campbell, has just received a bottle of white wine in the post. At the risk of breaking a confidence or breaching copyright I am pasting in his email on the subject:

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.