I've just come out of an excellent Nature meeting. Of course most of the documents we were addressing are company confidential and I cannot share them. It is, however, no secret that the Nature Publishing Group has successfully moved from being a magazine publisher with one flagship journal to being a scientific information and communication organisation whose lifeblood is on the internet. Two million registered users, ten million visits per month, 35 million page views per month and about 50% of its sales entirely electronic - not to mention 95% of manuscripts received electronically and 100% refereed, edited and designed electronically.

But the factoid I thought you'd appreciate, which I'm allowed to share and which, I think, says a huge amount about the concerns of the contemporary world is the list of top terms sought by users on the site.

Stem cell - 2997

HIV - 1877

Global warming - 1460

Cancer - 893

I shoud add that the Independent newspaper has just given a great plug for Nature's weekly podcast which competes with Madonna for top billing in the podcast ratings.

For those of you who can read French and for those of you who can make intelligent guesses here and here are interesting links on blogger statistics sent in by a regular reader.

I suppose a few years ago the very concept of blogging would have been considered futuristic. One of Macmillan's authors, Ray Hammond, produces a monthly futurology newsletter which is well worth studying. Ray must be wrong quite a lot of the time but I bet he's right too - as usual picking the winner is the tough thing.

I don't get too carried away by technopredictions but I do reckon that some people in the book trade could do with a little bit more open-mindedness when it comes to thinking about the future of their own businesses - judging by some of the comments received on this blog over the last few days.

This question I posed a couple of days ago which was described by one of our most polite commentators as stupid has generated quite an amount of correspondence.

One argument is that price should be linked to value. Am I getting enough out of the hours spent reading the book. That would suggest that short books should (all other things being equal be more expensive than long ones. There are of course those who think that fat books are good value and there are many retailers who encourage 'bulking out' of novels.

Another argument is that people think books are too expensive because British publishers are money-grabbing idiots who love dishing out huge discounts to some retailers who then discount. I don't understand the argument because the issue I was trying to address is universal, not just British and not related to pricing in supermarkets versus independent stores. And discounts granted to retailers (incidentally) is only one factor in the business relationship between publisher and retailer. Other factors such as the cost of servicing, freight, speed and ease of payment, returns rates, author support also weigh heavily in publishers' commercial thinking.

One commentator thought I was out of touch suggesting £7.99 was a typical price for paperbacks. He cited some Penguin classics at higher price. I could quote back many many classics at £1 - give us a break!

Then there is the argument about whether prices should be printed on covers. And I don't want to get involved in that debate but it does seem a rather trivial matter for our industry compared with the threats of competing media, changing social behaviour and challenges to copyright.

And finally a question about the pricing of textbooks where the US market has seen significant price inflation which is then exported. It's hard to argue against the idea that students find paying $100 for a book difficult. The problem has arisen, in my view, because college textbooks have become over-engineered (rather like American cars of the 1950s and 1960s). Too much colour, too much ancillary material, too long, too slow to market. Perhaps the answer is a return to shorter less flashy textbooks geared to specific courses and being revised annually.

But to finish on a positive note Book Marketing's latest update reports research that shows that for adults in the UK reading is an important activity for 79% and more popular than sex (69%), watching TV (67%), gardening (49%) and computer games (15%). Or the interviewees could have been lying.

And while browsing this excellent document I couldn't help noticing another statistic which confirms the views of most of my female and many of my male colleagues. On average men manage to take out 41.5 hours a week from their busy schedules to enjoy themselves whereas women only manage 23 hours. No comment needed.

I have just spent £8 on two replacement heads for my electric toothbrush. How does that compare to a 400-page book?

A few days ago I ran a story about the world winkle-spitting championship and the winner, Alain Jourden. Here he is shortly after his moment of glory.

On a more serious note the St James Partnership is an investment banking consultancy specialising in the media sector. They produce a regular newsletter on media deals. The newsletter always comes with an interesting introduction by its editor, Niko Jaakkola. With his permission I attach his latest thoughts which need no further gloss from me.

Dear Reader,

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.