Last time I was stuck in this godforsaken place and blogged it I was chastised as a a first-class travelling plutocratic publisher of no worth. So I`d better not moan about delays,lousy service, lousy signage, grumpy staff and attitudes more reminiscent of 1960s Britain than I care to remember. So let`s celebrate Tim Coates`s recovery of his own blog Good Library Blog - see Blogroll - which he`s managed to hijack back from the dastardly hijackers - and has celebrated the doubling of book purchases by libraries in Ulster. The scandal of diminishing book budgets in libraries (as opposed to the burgeoning of`other outreach activities`) would never have been noticed without Tim`s crusade. and it matters - see the comments on my previous blog. Aux barricades mes amis pour les bibliotheques - and please will someone privatise Air France properly as soon as possible.

Last year an old friend of mine, Tim Coates, launched a campaign to save British public libraries from politically-correct destruction. He was able to produce evidence showing that library expenditure on books was being devastated by explicit or implicit government policy in favour of 'outreach centres' etc. His campaign has not made him popular with government or parts of the library establishment. As part of his campaign he set up a Good Library Blog which I linked to. This blog has now been hijacked by some variety of loonies. Tim is putting it straight and will announce when things are back to normal. But it is really sad that something so self-evidently worthwhile should be attacked for no reason.

Further to my mention of Glyndebourne I tripped over this cartoon.

 

Pan Macmillan have just announced a Manga distribution contract with the Japanese publisher leading the Manga revolution, Tokyopop. The market for Manga is doubling every year and Pan are aiming to gain the largest market share.

A rather different experience  when I attended a wonderful production of Die Fledermaus at the equally wonderful opera house at Glyndebourne last night. The only problem is the time it takes to get there from London. The show also starts quite early to allow a very long interval for picnics in the beautiful gardens.

This entails leaving London shortly after lunch. There is a story of the late great Australian media tycoon Kerry Packer. He was doing a deal in London involving a bunch of bankers and lawyers. At 2.30 several of them upped and left, explaining they had to get to Glyndebourne. He is said to have remarked (language softened) that 'this is typical of the bloody Poms. They charge an arm and a leg for doing f all and then b.....r off to the races at the drop of a hat.'

Apart from the opera itself the evening is a marvellous way to observe the English (and visiting European and American) upper classes at play Here's a wondeful photo by Tony Ray-Jones from 1967. Nothing much has changed except that the cows seem to have been entirely replaced by sheep this year.

 

I have been reading about Amazon's latest problems with Wall Street in Publishers Weekly. Most of us would be more than content with sales growth of 16% but it is amazing how an organisation the size and quality of Amazon can show operating income of just 2.5% (and I bet that's before all sorts of dadeda - as in EBITDA - and one-offs). On the other hand, for Wall Street to savage a company for investing in its future does seem a bit harsh. Perhaps Amazon should pay a bit more attention to the bottom line by focussing less on the price 'flywheel' and more on range and service - at least when it comes to books.

But while reading this article my eye skipped to an ad for big bad book blog which is an excellent, informative and entertaining site put together by the Greenleaf Book Group who look to be a really sensible publishing company except for one thing. Why pay for an ad on PW Online when they could have had this plug for free?

Someone who never failed to understand the bottom line was my old boss, Paul Hamlyn. I was delighted to see that his Foundation is still going strong and dishing out money intelligently and generously - typical of the man whom I and many others miss enormously.

 

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,

Last time I mused over 'decisions, decisions for the media mogul of tomorrow' - presupposing there would be some!

A favourite game of the media world 20 years ago was to guess which six, of the then twenty, big groups would emerge globally on top; again, presupposing there would be groups, competing together, essentially doing the same thing.

The twin functions of historic publishing have been editing content, and distributing it. With the inexorable rise of online distribution, the latter function is becoming redundant. More interestingly, Google is a working example of how the former function, too, may eventually become automated. An editing machine of power unimaginable less than 10 years ago, it is starting to cause serious worry in the minds of not only academic publishers, but traditional book publishers as well. What will the landscape look like after ten more years of developing clever algorithms, driven by serious financial incentives?

The work of The St James Partnership team has been to talk to media owners, large and small, and we sense everyday the joy that owning media brings. But, 20 years into the future, will we still see the media mogul of old? Or will it just be Google and their ilk - not to forget the good old state-funded Aunty! - with all of us posting our tuppence worth up on to the net, just as I am doing now!

Best wishes,

Niko Jaakkola