It was an evening for nostalgia last night as a team from Macmillan Distribution (MDL), ably supported by their colleagues at Palgrave Macmillan, paraded around the streets of London, masquerading as Bobby Moore and the boys from the 1966 world cup winning team.  (MDL: A Winning Team.)  David Smith, MD of MDL, took the part of the referee in leading his team round the course and even took the opportunity to send off one of the ‘Wayne Rooneys’, from the HarperCollins team.  For the evening I became an honorary member of MDL and adopted the persona of Geoff Hurst (he was the guy who scored the winning goal against Germany in 1966), joining the boys and girls in red.  We certainly made plenty of noise with our football rattles and World Cup Willie blaring out of the loud speakers.

And the reason for all this was a charity walk on behalf of BTBS known as Walkies.  BTBS is the book trade’s own welfare charity and Walkies is their yearly sponsored walk around checkpoints that include the likes of the Publishers' Association, Foyles bookshop and Bloomsbury.  MDL were not the only ones to send up a team and a variety of costumes and themes were on display.  In the end the prize for best team went to Vista who were dressed up in medical outfits with ‘Vista Cures’ on the back.  The Macmillan team were very proud to come an honourable second although I have had to point out that being a good loser sucks.

The Guardian has an in-depth article about Google and publishers. There's not much new in the piece although it's well written and informative. What I found most interesting is that it is clearly the result of a public relations exercise by Google to influence public opinion in their favour. I can quite understand this but I do wish that such a great organisation would spend less money on spinning their story and concentrate on finding solutions to their impasse with copyright owners.And incidentally, one might think that Google is the only search engine in the world. Thank goodness it is not (monopolies are rarely beneficial) and perhaps newspaper journalists should talk to some of the other organisations in the business. They seem to be able to cope with copyright. 

And finally, now for some thing completely different. Can anyone work out what this ad was intended to say? I am entirely mystified by the hilarious typo. Answers on a postcard (or more simply post a comment) please....

Emma Giacon of Pan attended a meeting today about further developments at King's Cross. Here's her report:

"Peter Millican from the King's Place development and Richard Thompson from architects Dixon Jones popped in at lunchtime to give us all a bit more info on what's going on in the building site next door. After last week's events, first on most people's minds was 'Can we expect to be evacuating our offices again any time soon?'  The answer, happily, was no, with Peter apologising profusely for the inconvenience.  Apparently it was a very small fire, and didn't slow down the building work too much... lucky them!

Development on the site is coming on apace, and we were told that the building will begin to take shape properly around Christmas.  By all accounts it will be an impressive space:  two concert halls (the larger of which will seat 425 people), sculptures (that will be visible from York Way as well as throughout the building), and a floor devoted to visual arts (that will house a permanent collection of portraits) will all be open to the public.  A colonnade along the York Way side of the development will provide some glamour to a currently unappealing road, while an internal street will lead visitors from York Way right through the building to the canal.
I should mention that this will be a very ‘green’ building, producing only half the CO₂ per square metre that most offices produce.

The York Way side of the building will also benefit from a glass façade - which as well as looking very striking - will also provide a noise barrier for the building within.  Dixon Jones (who have worked on notable projects including The Royal Opera House, National Gallery and National Portrait Gallery) have also included a rotunda building that will sit on the corner of the canal basin.  The ground floor of the rotunda will house a huge brasserie restaurant with inside and outside dining, and there will also be a private events section canalside.

We will certainly be gaining illustrious neighbours renting the offices on site.  As well as 1500 staff from The Guardian, the Sinfonietta Orchestra and The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment will be in residence, and New Music groups such as NMC, SPNM and BMIC will likely be based there.  We also hear that Central St Martin's Art College is moving to Kings Cross, so our bright new authors from Pan will be joined by bright young artists - very appropriate!

The thing to remember about all this is that as well as this particular development, the area in general will be completely overhauled by Argent (beginning late 2007 when the Channel Tunnel link is completed).  It really feels as though we are witnessing of something very exciting and refreshing, of which all locals, residents and business, will be able to take advantage."

I spent the morning trying to issue the following internal announcement about an important promotion:

Those of you who like me are concerned about the activities of some organisations challenging authors's rights might like to see an organisation which is wholly positive for authors and the book industry. LibraryThing was invented and built by Tim Spalding and you can read some notes from him and others on his blog. There is also an article in the Wall Street Journal which is open access for thirty days - so read it fast.

Everything about this project makes sense. I do sometimes worry that publishers' legitimate requirement to protect copyright can be interpreted as luddism. It is not but we can do ourselves and our authors a service by wholeheartedly supporting technology where it really does support comunication and sharing of ideas.

Incidentally, Tim Spalding is also the publisher of Isidore of Seville which I'm incapable of describing but which again seems to offer simplicity, service and information. Three cheers.

Shame about England's inability to score penalties in soccer but at least we can stop worrying now and take down the flags of St George which were a little too nationalistic for my liking. This prediction from one of yesterday's papers was foresightful:

Should the quarter-final go to penalties, Hargreaves believes England will reverse a trend that has seen them go out of four major tournaments on shoot-outs.

Hargreaves, who scored one of England's penalties when they lost against Portugal in Euro 2004, said: 'I fancy our chances on penalties. For example, I don't think a German could take a better penalty than an Englishman. We've got dead ball specialists such as David Beckham, Frank Lampard and Steven Gerrard and they are some of the best in the world.'

England lost shoot-outs against Portugal (Euro 2004), Argentina (World Cup 1998), Germany (Euro 96) and West Germany (World Cup 1990). Their only victory on penalties came against Spain at Euro 96.

Hargreaves, Beckham, Gerrard, Lampard, Ashley Cole, Wayne Rooney and John Terry are known to be keen to take a penalty but Eriksson will not nominate in advance.

I have been quite rightly chided for failing to celebrate Thursday's triumph at the Crime Writers' Association awards. Ann Cleeves the Duncan Lawrie Dagger award for her book Raven Black. This is the biggest crime writing prize in the world, completely deserved and wonderful for one of Macmillan's (and Pan's) favourite authors.

Another Macmillan author, Malcolm Mann, has written twelve English language teaching texts for us and there are more in the pipeline. He has just launched a new website called Manifesto UK which is an experiment in online democracy. Do try it out.

The number of visitors to this blog in June was 27169, 19% ahead of May. I'm sure the world cup, soaring European and North American temperatures and the holiday season will slow the growth over the next few months. Nonetheless in the interests of finding out more about the web by doing rather than theorising I've been trying to register with Google Adwords in order to generate revenues to pay for my overheads. So far the process has defeated us but we're trying - so expect to see some ads at some point.

This morning I've been reading my favourite magazine - the Summer issue of The Author published by The Society of Authors. It is, in my opinion, by far the most important reading material for publishers. Of course I don't agree with everything in it but if we don't understand authors' concerns we'll never get anywhere. It also has the merit of being written mainly by professional authors and so the literary quality is superior to other such association publications. It's not obvious ho0w to subscribe but perhaps an email to theauthor@societyofauthors.org might do the trick. A flavour of the contents of this issue - Publishers internet strategies, A positive view of the Wattakars bid, The long-anticipated development of e-paper, Authors as limited companies etc.

I was in Oxford yesterday at the Macmillan Education offices in the former car-building (and now new Mini building) area of Cowley. Driving back I thought I might indulge in one of my favourite pastimes - listening to international cricket on the radio (Test Match Special). Unfortunately the English team were so dreadful and unprofessional in being beaten for the fourth time in a row by Sri Lanka I couldn't bear to listen.

Instead I tried to calculate the size of the publishing industry in Oxfordshire (Oxford and its surrounding area). It is a really impressive bunch of companies. Big daddy in terms of employees, sales and profits is probably Oxford University Press itself. Reed Elsevier has two major units - Elsevier Science in Kidlington (which incorporates the famous and brillian Pergamon Press of Robert Maxwell fame) and Harcourt Education in Jordanhill (incorporating Heinemann Education, Ginn, Rigby etc). Blackwell Publishing is up the road from our offices and, not to be confused with its retailing cousins, is a hugely successful and profitable academic and scientific publisher. A little further South near Abingdon are the main offices of the academic divisions of Informa (Taylor & Francis, Routledge etc). Also in Abingdon we can find Hodder's distribution centre Bookpoint. And there are scores of smaller but no less significant specialist and general publishing firms scattered around the area.

I estimate total sales of publications emanating from these companies at well over €3 billion and profits close on €500m. I reckon this is more than the total profit emanating from London and maybe even New York. Explanations please.

Yesterday's blog (the bit about Macmillan Science) elicited a comment from Peter Collingridge who runs a design consultancy for publishing clients called APT. It's well worth reading as a constructive critique of the way Macmillan and others are approaching web marketing and the use of the Internet.

I have discovered one way of increasing traffic to this blog is to write the words 'Jeffrey Archer'. However, on this occasion I am not interested in increasing the number of visitors here but to encourage you to look at Jeffrey's blog which is part of his official website.

And while on the use of the Internet as a marketing vehicle, President Chirac has inaugurated a French version of Google Earth (although they deny that this is what it is). It launched last week and the interest has been so great that the following page comes up

http://www.geoportail.fr/excuses.htm.

I've left the url as it stands because there's something about the word 'excuses' which is perfectly fine in French but in English says it all. And some governments still think they can do a better job of web publishing than private enterprise....

And finally an excellent article in Nature which analyses the financial standing of the most important open access organisation The Public Library of Science. What the article shows is that the 'author pays' model for scientific publishing is likely to be unsustainable without charitable support. I don't think that scientific publishing should be a charitable enterprise. Its innovation and growth has been driven by commercial market pressures to improve which have always been the best guarantee of high-quality service. The alternatives nearly always end in bureaucracy and protection of the status quo.