Please have a look at yesterday's entry on the difficulties of publishing non-fiction. Probably because it was a Sunday and people have some spare time or because there are some soccer-and-tennis phobes wanting to escape TV we had a great postbag.

In short, the solution from the comments is to publish fewer better titles, reduce prices, give better discounts to independent retailers and worse ones to supermarkets, chains and Amazon, not accept returns, not pay advances, spend money on editorial and design overheads but overall reduce publishing costs.

All good stuff. I remember a management accountant at OUP wondering alound why on earth we didn't stick to publishing best selling expensive titles with low unit costs. He was, of course, right.

I believe Macmillan Science is a legitimate attempt to find a new model which can benefit all 'stakeholders' but en passant our average UK subscription (the support given by booksellers in terms of advance orders ensuring visibility in store) is around 200 copies across 4000 accounts. And these are returnable!

Ah well, soccer must be tough too - Ronaldo sneaks on his team-mate, Zidane nuts someone in the chest, the Argentinian team assaults the Germans after the final whistle, the apparently corrupt Italians win, and Germany doesn't make the final to the disappointment of the advertising community. Now we can concentrate on Pakistan beating England at cricket.

And while on cricket this is by Mike Hopkin a reporter for News at Nature. We feel the match should have been reported on cricinfo and I am still hopeful. Meanwhile charkinblog will have to do:

Cricketing glory for NPG

Arguably one of the few things more complicated than calculating journal impact factors is cricket, so it made sense for Nature to challenge its perennial citation competitors Science to a match.

Science were hoping to avenge their crushing defeat of three years ago, whereas for Nature, a British institution playing that most venerable of English sports, defeat against an American journal (albeit its British staff) was unthinkable.

The select band travelled to Cambridge to be greeted by a tropical downpour and the very real possibility of spending the whole afternoon in the clubhouse. But as the rain relented we realized the battle for scientific and sporting supremacy was on.

With Nature first to bat and clouds still looming, a strong start was vitally important. Thankfully the intensity of the first two overs was unmatched by anything that followed, with Nature's openers Adam Rutherford and captain Andy Douglas smacking Science's surprisingly pacy attack to all quarters of the field.

With the scoreboard ticking along nicely and plenty of wickets in hand, Nature finished with a score of 152 for 9. Good, but would it be enough to defend against a Science batting line-up with obvious hunger in their eyes (and not just for the sandwiches)?

Science, needing to score at more than 6 runs per over to win, were on the back foot as soon as they came up against Nature's devastatingly fast opening attack pairing of Neil Smith and Rob Dicks. Smith combined with Mike Hopkin to produce arguably the scalping of the day, dismissing former Nature staffer Pete Wrobel with a fizzingly fast delivery and slip catch hailed by spectators as "just like proper cricket, like you get on TV".

Any hope the home side had of matching Nature's total evaporated when man of the match Chris 'the Wizard' Townson then produced a simply unplayable spell of bowling, finding pace and bounce on a rapidly drying pitch to claim two victims at a cost of just one run (for those more familiar with baseball, almost the equivalent of pitching a no-hitter).

In the end it was a comfortable victory for Nature by some 70 runs, Science finishing all out for 82. Honourable mentions go to Rutherford for his top score of 40, Douglas for inspiring captaincy, Richard Charkin for unrelenting commitment (including a full-length dive to avoid a run-out), and Peter Collins for overcoming an almost total lack of prior cricketing ability to inflict damage with both ball and bat. Great work also from Gerard Preston, Arran Frood, Quinton Creighton and Robin Brown in ensuring victory.

At a recent meeting of British general book publishers there was a general moan about the state of the non-fiction market. Quality history, biography, politics, economics hardbacks sell bewen 2000 and 20,000 copies in hardback. UK sales of totally brilliant books such as Tom Friedman's The World is Flat are a tiny fraction of US even allowing for population differences. It appears that Americans are more prepared to purchase and read challenging books than the British.

At the more popular end of the market there are some huge sellers - Sharon Osborne, Katy Price etc - but there are large numbers of failures too. And these failures are usually very expensive. Every second-rate Big Brother famous-for-five minutes celebrity is demanding (and frequently getting) ludicrous advances from publishers desperate to find something to sell through supermarkets to to the mass market.

And so neither the up-market nor the mass market is performing. Add to this the demise of backlist sales, the pitifully small paperback sales and the legitimate demands of authors for a fair reward for their work. Furthermore in order to achieve this unsatisfactory state of affairs publishers are spending big marketing budgets and granting special discounts to retailers thus undermining their low profitability further.

In the words of the great Russian sage when asked how to solve the problems of their great Tsarist empire: I have the solution. Someting must be done about it.  

Driving on the A20 just South of Limoges in the middle of France I spotted an enormous BMW motorbike with a gendarme with sunglasses aboard waving me down. Off to an 'air' along with several other foreign cars accompanied by similar policemen.

You were exceeding the 130 km per hour speed limit.

But it's not raining. It's 110 when it rains but 130 in the dry.

Not on this stretch.

How would I know that?

Use your eyes.

What now?

You have two choices. Pay a fine right now (no credit cards allowed) or I confiscate your driving licence, you stay the night here until someone rescues you, you go to court and then we fine you. It is your choice.

How much? €90. Okay. Here's two €50 notes.

I don't have any change.

Okay, don't worry. Keep the €10.

I am not an Italian poloceman, I am French.

Sorry. How about borrowing the €10 and betting it on France to beat Italy on Sunday. If France wins (which please God they do) we could split the winnings. If not, tant pis.

He didn't go along with this suggestion, borrowed €10 from a mate to give me and let me go. I was so relieved. I suspect that if I were Italian I'd have had a lot tougher session.

Bon weekend tout le monde et allez France.

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.