A few days ago one of the commentators on this blog exonerated copyright thieves on the grounds that publishing companies are greedy money-making organisations who don't deserve protection.  This may be the case in rare instances but by and large general publishing is a low-margin business particularly when compared with other high-risk investments such as oil exploration, aviation manufacture, films - or even low-risk ventures such as investment banking, legal services, accountancy etc.

One reason for the low margins might be pricing.  I think that current prices are unbelievably low by almost any criterion - yet people still think they're expensive.

A full-price quality paperback is £7.99 in the UK.  A cinema ticket in London is the same price unless you go to a posh place where it'll be more. The average price of a main course at a moderate gastropub is £12. A not very distinguished bottle of wine is £8.99.

And the £7.99 paperback is the result of months or years of authorial creativity, 500 pages of sophisticated printing and binding, a complex distribution and marketing network - and something to keep, re-read, lend, refer to, argue about, enjoy.

And this fantastic value is not just confined to works of fiction. When I was a medical editor at OUP one of our best sellers was Sir Zachary Cope's Early Diagnosis of the Acute Abdomen. It was then in its 13th edition having originally been published during World War I. The original price was one guinea - at the time around $4. Back in 1980 we were selling most of the copies in the USA (apparently British textbooks were lousy at therapy but okay at diagnosis, particularly that requiring clinical discernment rather than technological excellence) and the price was $4.95. Applying inflation the price should have been $100.

So what is it that makes people

a) think books are overpriced

b) think publishers make too much money?

Answers on a blogcard, please.

Before the world as we know it publishers invented systems for numbering their titles for reasons of identification and book-keeping. I don't have access to the exact historical records but my understanding is that a bunch of British publishers got together and invented the 9-digit standard book number (SBN). One of the major publishers (Macmillan as it happens) stood out against it (doubtless on the grounds that they considered their internal system the best and that they wanted to be different). Everyone came into line when the powerful retailer, W H Smith, refused to stock any book without an SBN - game, set and match to the SBN.

Shortly afterwards the rest of the world joined in and the ISBN (with a language digit introduced) became ten digits and became ubiquitous. Surprisingly, book publishing had become a leader in identifier technology which set it up well for the computer age.

More recently retailers have been demanding a 13-digit ISBN so that many other products can have a similar identification structure - magazines, DVDs etc. It makes sense and the industry has been working away to implement ISBN-13 on January 1 2007.

This blog and many of its commentators have dealt with the inadequacies of book publishers - not enough risk-taking, too little investment, picking the wrong books, luddism, declining standards, ignoring the small retailer, copyright problems, etc, etc.

ISBN-13 may not get the juices running like literary argumentation but it is a brilliant example of publishers working together on a hugely difficult project (it affects every system in a publishing company - billing, royalties, production, editorial, sales, finance and more). It has taken large amounts of cash, millions of technical person-hours, imagination and insight.

If all goes well, what will it achieve? A total non-event. Next year books will be ordered and sold as normal. And it will be because publishers' IT departments have worked hard and well. The people involved don't get headlines in the trade press and definitely they don't have awards ceremonies. Nobody writes about them when they change jobs and they don't flounce. Thank God for them all.

Have you noticed a rise in great blogs about books? My attention has recently been drawn to bookbar.com and to Danuta Kean's web site and associated blog both of which are well worth taking a look at. There was a thoughtful guide to the UK's book bloggers in The Bookseller last week, too.

I also just wanted to highlight The Guardian's recent coverage of German bestseller Measuring the World, which has been a runaway sensation selling 600,000 copies in hardback since last September and is published by one of the Holtzbrinck Group companies, Rowohlt. Not only has it delighted readers but it has also been universally praised by Germany's 'famously grudging critics'....Its author - 31-year-old Daniel Kehlmann - has been hailed as 'a literary wunderkind'.

Chris Anderson's new book The Long Tail has been eagerly anticipated. Why? He blogged it first, of course. Partly due to the blogosphere effect and partly because it explains a concept that holds an innate attraction for many of us, it has been greeted with enormous enthusiasm and has been fallen upon as a kind of gospel for our age by content creators in many media. The Long Tail suggests that in this culture of the blockbuster in which we seemingly live, the wonder of the Internet is that it enables - no, encourages, even - the niche interest to flourish as well as the mass market. So, online retailers can afford to 'stock' thousands of titles and are therefore able to benefit from the 'long tail' of small scale sales; niche interest groups can indulge their interests, networking with the comparitively few others that share their passion. Natasha Walter has explained it all much more cogently here at Guardian Unlimited and Chris Anderson himself discusses his book on the Guardian's Newsdesk podcast.   

About a month ago a burglar broke into the Pan Bookshop, lifted  (rather little) cash from the till and then proceeded to urinate and defecate over the stock. This is apparently common behaviour among burglars in the UK (and perhaps elsewhere too).  Fortunately the stupid and unpleasant criminal cut himself on some broken glass and the police were able to track him down. He has pleaded guilty which saves us the trouble of having to go to court. But the affair leaves a nasty taste in the mouth.

On a brighter note Hazel Bell has won the Wheatley Award for the index in W. B. Yeats's Mythologies. In these days of Yahoo, Google and other automatic indexing machines it's great that the Society of Indexers still exists to promote professional indexing by intelligent himan beings. The quality of an index is rarely appreciated by the general reader but it can frequently turn an informative book into a real information resource. Let's hear it for the unsung heroes of the book world.