Arrived in Egypt for the first time at 1.00am this morning after coping with Heathrow security etc etc. First impressions:

They drive on the right in spite of still using pounds as their currency;

They identify the quality of fruit by naming the best quality after film stars and worst quality after George Bush;

They claim that more Mercedes are sold in Egypt than in Germany;

On arrival at the airport we were whisked into a luxury lounge, had our passports and luggage tickets taken away and suddenly everything (customs, passport control, luggage carousel) was fixed - nowhere else in the world that I've experienced...

We're here because the Egyptian Government has decided to encourage competition among publishers to produce the best quality textbooks for schools and colleges. Macmillan has worked in Egypt for more than thirty years and intends to be part of the massive opportunities of a country with 15 million schoolchildren, 4 million university students and a commitment to education as a driver of economic and social progress. There are many many problems but as usual we follow our new mission statement - We're doing our best.

I was at a celebration yesterday afternoon to welcome Graham Swift back to Picador. His last book was published by Penguin. He told a nice story of how he was in a very swanky Madrid hotel recently. Apparently this was the hotel where bullfighting stars stayed when preparing for an event. So perhaps unsurprising but uncomfortable to share the lift with two fully-uniformed picadors. As he pointed out, this is still more likely than sharing a lift with two penguins.

There was a certain tension in the air because we (and Graham's agent) were awaiting the announcement of the Man Booker prize long list. We were delighted that books by two authors published by Picador, Claire Messud and Edward St Aubyn were selected. The trouble with the longlist is that it must really hurt not to be on it if you think you have a chance but that being on it is still a huge distance from winning the prize itself. Fingers crossed that these two make it to the next round to be announced on 14 September and then they can both suffer the agony of awaiting the final announcement on 10 October. Authors published by Picador have won the prize the last two years (Alan Hollinghurst and John Banville). I'm not sure any publisher has ever achieved a hat-trick but records are there to be set.

I wrote about Gerard Jones and his directory of trade publishers. This has generated a few comments which say what a good thing he is - and I am sure he is - but I asked a question: Why does he bother? He hasn't responded in the comments section but he has emailed me this reply and in the interests of freedom of speech and assuming he has no objection here it is:

'Richard Charkin has a blog, upon which he had this to say about one of my innocent little e-mails and this to say about me:

I don't think anyone hates Gerard and certainly no-one that I know of minds his publishing names etc. Actually nobody gives a damn about him.The question is why does he bother?!

Why he bothers is that books have become "product," merely another means to make nothing but money...not art, not truth, not beauty, nothing worth anything but money. Books themselves don't matter a whit, how much money they generate is all. With the right packaging, enough endorsements, a fair amount of expensive hype and a modicum of proof-reading, any piece of unreadable drivel can make some short-term money. That's the publishing industry's stock in trade. It's the same as the salami industry. There are truly great salamis out there that nobody's ever going to get to eat 'cause you don't see 'em advertised on the telly. The Audio Book of Ginny Good is a greater literary experience than everything Macmillan has published in the last twenty years combined but nobody's ever gonna listen to it 'cause nobody can make any money off it. It's free. That's anathema. G.'

Well, I think Gerard is wrong. The publishing industry is full of people who care about books. He wants to believe the opposite simply because his proposals haven't been accepted as widely as he'd have liked. There are always two explanations of failure. One is that you need to try harder or get better. The other is that the world is conspiring against you. The latter is better for the ego. The former is probably the more likely.

There's a guy called Gerard Jones who sends emails around the publishing industry about his website. I think he's probably a talented writer. I think he's also extremely assiduous judging by the amount of time and effort he has dedicated to creating a huge database of people in the publishing and related industries. Here's an example of his email style:

Why does he do it? Making enemies can't be the best way to help his efforts to be published. He can't make money from it (or can he?). Perhaps it's a way of creating a community of like-minded people. He seems to think there is a conspiracy among publishers to avoid new talent, to promote rubbish and in general to do a very bad job. All this might be true but I'd like to reassure Gerard and anyone else who thinks similarly that there is no conspiracy - it is merely incompetence. Perhaps the publishing industry should adopt a mission statement - WE'RE DOING OUR BEST.

Having posted this I went to get my weekly fix of book browsing - in an independent bookshop - all right, not that independent, the Pan Bookshop. I picked up a copy of Bad Faith by Carmen Callil. It is history of the guy in the Vichy Government responsible for 'controlling the Jewish population' in Southern France. I haven't read it yet but it is clearly a work of scholarship about a fascinating period of French history. It must have taken the author years of research, tears and trouble to produce this 600-page treatise. It is beautifully designed and produced by the team at Jonathan Cape, part of Random House UK, part of Random House Worldwide, part of Bertelsmann Media Worldwide. The book's audience is clearly not mass market and yet, in spite of the consolidation, gloabalisation and commercialisation of the industry it has seen the light of day and found a market ( I bought a copy and so, according to the bookshop manager, have another forty people, helped by a signing session).

Alongside this book were hundreds (possibly thousands) of similarly excellent titles - a great range, beautifully produced, idiosyncratic but tailored to the local market - at great prices. Bad Faith was £20 in hardback which elsewhere in the Fulham Road in London buys a bunch of asparagus, 100g of Brie and two glasses of wine. The point of this is to suggest that maybe (just maybe) the industry is doing a great job and is getting better by becoming more professional and more market-aware. If so, then perhaps a little credit should go to the dedicatee of Bad Faith - 'To PBH' - Paul Hamlyn who, extraordinarily does not have a Wikipedia entry and so you'll have to make do with a link to one of his legacies - another reason to be cheerful.

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.