After last week's utterances from the British government about building creative hubs blah blah I was pleased to see that the Macmillan English Dictionary's Word of the Week was garbology. I was hoping that this was the new science of studying verbal garbage as practised by civil servants, management consultants and politicians throughout the world. Unfortunately it is the much more prosaic but possibly more interesting 'study of a person or group of people by examining what they throw away'.

Anyway, this led me to look more closely at how our English Language Teaching websites and electronic resources have been developing. Given the importance of English in the world. Given the importance of language to international understanding. Given the importance of education to economic prosperity I am delighted that Macmillan is leading the industry. You just have to check out a few sites to see what I mean.

One Stop English

Macmillan English

Dictionary Magazine

Macmillan English Campus

Macmillan English for India

We've had quite a bit of interesting correspondence  on the need for scientists to communicate better. I think it applies to everyone and particularly in the UK where reticence and inability to speak other people's languages are considered virtues. Maybe this will change with  better education.

My colleague Timo Hannay looks after Nature's blue-sky developments in technology and most of the blue skies are turning out be real.

He also contributes to the Nascent blog and yesterday he was hoping to get on a plane to San Francisco for a science Foo Camp. Foo is an abbreviation of Friends of O'Reilly. Tim O'Reilly founded O'Reilly Media, a hugely successful technology publisher. Tim is viewed as one of the most far-sighted publishers in the world and has forged close relations with the movers and shakers of the Web 2.0 generation. His Foo camps have become legendary events for open discussions among top practitioners in any number of fields. Nature is proud to have been working with O'Reilly and Google to organise a Science Foo Camp today and tomorrow at the famous Googleplex. There are 200 of the world's top scientists and knowledge engineers discussing the future. Goodness knows what will be the outcome but for sure it will be interesting and for sure Timo will write it up for us.

On a more parochial but interesting historical note, Matthias Mueller, a student in publishing studies at City University in London is writing a dissertation on the Net Book Agreement (whatever that is). He's asked me to encourage interested people to fill in his questionnaire which can be found on his blog.

August in the UK (and I imagine elsewhere) is known as the silly season. So many people are away on holiday. Parliament closes down. Schools are shut. So little happens that newspapers constantly have to concoct absurd stories to fill their pages (even more than usual). Practical jokes are played too.

I received an email yesterday from someone in the British Government asking me to review the draft reports from the CEP working party groups. CEP is the Creative Economy Programme and it is a government-sponsored (ie tax-payer funded) project to 'make the most out of the great creative talents thriving all round the country, and is the first step in the Government's goal of making the UK the world's creative hub.' Truly a worthy objective and in line with many of the Government's policies. The question is how they intend to go about achieving this ojective.

On the assumption that not too many of you will want to plough through these documents I thought you might like a flavour taken from the executive summary of the infrastructure working group.

This document provides an overview of the key themes and recommendations from the Creative Economy Programme Infrastructure Working Group.  It introduces a set of essential and actionable ways forward to maximise the UK’s cultural and creative infrastructure offer as a key driver for creative competitiveness and growth.  These ways forward are encapsulated in the concept of the Creative Grid.  The Creative Grid represents a new way to connect our creative asset base, broker and coordinate new relationships and partnerships, and provide vital market-driven intelligence, in order to give the UK a competitive edge as the knowledge broker of the global creative economy.

The Creative Grid and its component parts provide the strategic framework for each of the other Creative Economy Programme Working Groups, connecting their targeted policy recommendations through the following three main themes:

Global Competitiveness: Our creative critical mass and knowledge advantage is based around the connectivity of concentrations of infrastructure and activity seen most prominently in our Core Cities, London and the South East.  A key challenge is to focus these assets outwards – towards global markets and partners – to ensure the UK is recognised as a global creative leader.

Convergence: It is in the connectivity of these concentrations of infrastructure and activity that ideas are shared, that technology meets content, that culture meets commerce.  A key challenge is to build effective links between different parts of the creative value chain and across traditional sectoral, institutional and locational boundaries.

Stimulation: Progressive creative senses of place are formed, and creative people are stimulated, by connectivity of concentrations of infrastructure and activity.  A key challenge is to position cultural and creative infrastructure at the heart of place and community, which will allow our cities to flourish as creative hubs that work together and with London and the South East for increased UK creative competitiveness.

Well, that clarifies things. I imagine this will set our authors well on the way to lead the world in creativity. Or, given the silly season, is this a practical joke? I was also glad to find out that book publishing is a product business as opposed to a process business (eg architecture) or media (eg newspapers). Hmm.

There was a ghastly groundhog day moment when I was listening to the news yesterday about a team from the Arab League flying to New York to persuade the UN to amend the peace plans for Lebanon. At the end of the bulletin the programme presenter whispered (on air) to his colleague 'I think that was yesterday's news bulletin'. And so it was. But I hadn't noticed (and nor presumably had the BBC technicians). A sad commentary on the Middle East situation. 

A happier day for England cricket where a brilliant test match ended in an England victory. The really good news was that the two heroes of the final day were Mudhsuden Singh Panesar (Monty) and Sajid Iqbal Mahmood (Saj) whose names tell a story. British Asians are becoming mainstream sports stars which will further enhance respect for the first and second-generation immigrants who have done so much for Britain.

A publishing statistic - worldwide sales of textbooks increased 8% year on year according to a recent study from EPS. This is not so surprising. Although mature markets such as the UK have constrained spending on school materials many developing countries have recognised the importance of education as a necessary forerunner of economic and social development (thank God) and have increased budgets for textbooks.

The more telling statistic is that online educational sales increased 18%. In parallel I saw that in Australia teachers are being encouraged to retire earlier in order to bring forward a new cohort of younger teachers more sympathetic to electronic learning systems. In the USA every college course is supplemented with or indeed driven by electronic materials for learning, testing and administration.

The electronic revolution in educational publishing has been slower to arrive than in, say, scientific or legal publishing but it's coming and it's coming fast.

Every now and again the book industry is convulsed by a bout of plagiarism. Someone is suspected of lifting material from another author, there is a court case, someone wins, someone loses and the loser not only loses the case but is typically subjected to abuse from the literary police force. This is not much different from athletes being caught taking performance-enhancing drugs. It used to be otherwise.

I was listening to a Prom (an annual series of concerts broadcast by the BBC) last night and heard for the first time Michael Haydn's Requiem pro defuncto Archiepiscopo Sigismundo which was first performed in 1771 when Mozart was fifteen years old. The introducer of the prom mentioned the friendship between Michael Haydn and Mozart in spite of the near twenty year age difference. He also mentioned the similarities between the Haydn Requiem and the later Mozart Requiem. There are references in various sources to the fact that the Haydn work 'greatly influenced' Mozart. I wonder what is the difference between being greatly influenced and pinching.

Go listen. If this were raised in a contemporary court I reckon Mozart would be branded a top-class plagiarist and would have to hand over his gold medal and a chunk of his reputation to Michael Haydn.

And for today's light relief go to Scott Pack's blog. He wa sthe chief buyer at Waterstone's book chain for a period and he tells the inside story of his departure. He is now working for the innovative Friday Project who might well become the exemplar of a modern book publishing company.

A second posting in a day but I'm afraid it's a business one. The Publishers Association has just released an excellent primer on e-books which I wanted to let you know about - details at the PA website. At £100 for 70-odd pages for non-members (half that for PA members) it appears rather expensive but, as someone pointed out in a previous discussion about book prices, it's the quality not the quantity that matters.

I know that many of the readers of this blog are more interested in literary publishing than scientific research. However, the debate about how best to use the Internet to disseminate information about the latest scientific and medical findings is, I believe, relevant to all types of publishing in one way or another.

There are a number of criss-crossing arguments. In essence, the open-access advocates believe that the fruits of research should be made available through the Internet free of charge to every citizen. This is particularly true where the research has been funded by taxpayers (the bulk of research is funded this way). The business model proposed is that the author (or more likely funding agency) would pay the publisher a fee to cover the costs of publication and access would then be 'open'.

The counterargument is that an 'author-pays' model increases the likelihood of less vigorous refereeing; less investment by publishers in improving the processes of editing, storing and distributing; the proposed business model is intrinsicaly more administratively burdensome than the present one (collecting fees from tens or hundreds of thousands of authors is harder than collecting subscriptions from a thousand university libraries); and is commercially unsustainable.

In any event, a number of open-access publishers have been established and are carving a niche for themselves. In some cases they are achieving very respectable 'impact factors' ( a measure of quality). Nature recently published an article (which I linked too in an earlier posting) suggesting that a well-known open-access pioneer, Public Library of Science, is a bit wobbly financially. This caused a fair amount of comment and has generated some really interesting views and discussion on Nature News Blog. I really think the debate is important and has implications for copyright, for freedom of information and for future publishing investment strategies. Do read it. It is one of the strengths of the web and publishing that dangerous and difficult arguments can be freely expressed and everyone can participate.

If this is all too serious for you perhaps you'd enjoy my entry for the worst song lyrics of the month.

I think I mentioned that my admission that we were taking Google ads on this blog generated flak from commentators. All well and good. That's why there is a comments section - and I've never felt the need to monitor or referee it.

However, I suspect that most of the comments are overlooked. So here are a few recent ones. And I'd love to have more.

Some of the comments are rather pompous. For instance my jokey piece yesterday on a new form of literary agency elicited:

I can't quite decide if this post displays a complete contempt for agents, a complete contempt for publishers, a complete contempt for authors, or a complete contempt for all three. Quite funny though.

For goodness sake! On the other hand this next commentator clearly understands more about marketing than the average publisher:

Is it any wonder that us "ordinary readers" have become increasingly cynical about the whole kitten caboodle and now blog amongst ourselves about great reads and pass the word around? Most of us are ignoring the review pages, the 3 for 2's and increasingly the prizelists.Plenty of us have been quietly exchanging great reads through international online reading groups for years and there's a potential audience that no one seems to have taken any notice of, do publishers even know they exist? Have you typed "reading group" into Yahoo groups lately?
Word of a good read spreads around these like a bush fire and likewise we telegraph the turkeys well in advance!
The Book Bloggers Book Prize when it comes to fruition will have a far bigger audience than many people realise and I don't think it will cost a penny to be shortlisted.The awards dinner won't wreck your cholesterol because it will be virtual, no new outfits to be bought, but just wait;the book that wins will truly deserve to be read.

And here are some wise words about brands in publishing and their importance or non-importance:

Very few consumers walk into a bookshop or browse Amazon and select a book on the strength of the publisher's brand. Penguin used to have that influence, but I would doubt that many book buyers would know if they have bought a Virgin book (Losing my Virginity excepted) even though Virgin has such strong brand recognition. Product reliability and quality is a major factor in the success of many of the companies in this list and this drives consumer loyalty. With a product as varied and variable as a publisher's booklist it is difficult to meet consumer expectation on each and every title (based on the last one read), making loyalty to one publisher brand extremely unlikely.

Please keep the comments coming. I really appreciate them

I was talking to an author this morning who changed his literary agent. The one he dumped was, apparently, very good at extracting large advances from publishers but he didn't show enough care in commenting on the author's work as he completed it.

This reminded of a long-held ambition of mine to start a new-look literary agency. The concept is twofold.

First, every author is different and is looking for different things from an agent. Some want love. Some want money. Some want accounting help, some don't. Some want an auctioneer, others simply want someone to negotiate fair terms with an existing publisher.

The second part of the concept is not to charge a percentage commission (on all sales until 70 years after the author's death in the UK) but to charge a fee in the same way that other professional advisers charge (lawyers, accountants etc).

Whenever I've discussed this idea with an agent it has been dismissed on the grounds that all authors want everything all the time and that I'd never be able to charge enough to cover my expenses without the cross-subsidy from easy money rolling in from the 'backlist' authors. They are probably right but I've had fun drawing up a draft a la carte menu for authors signing up with the imaginary new firm.

Opening file (cover charge) £100 (compulsory)

Reading manuscript and giving opinion £100 per hour

Reading manuscript and giving brutally frank opinion £500 per hour (but normally this only takes 15 minutes)

Phoning author to reassure £200 per hour subject to a minimum annual payment of £2000

Submitting an unknown author to appropriate publishers £500

Submitting a well-known author to publishers and conducting an auction £5000

Submitting a well-known author to her existing publisher £500

Drawing up contract and negotiating small print with publisher £200 per page of contract

Checking royalty statements and arguing with publisher £100 per hour

Complaining about sales and promotion on behalf of the author £100 per hour

Avoiding repayment of advance when author fails to deliver £500 per hour

Tendering legal advice £500 per hour plus direct outgoings and the cost of indemnity insurance

Transferring files to new agency £5000.

Please feel free to amend or add to these. I was also thinking of creating a menu touristique which gave a basic all-round (but not very good) service for £200 per annum.

I've had a lot of flak about running the Google ads. The next step in my learning is working out how to cancel it. I'll keep you informed.