The things I do to keep this blog fresh! My PC at home didn't work this morning and so I drove to Reading University early and persuaded the helpful IT team to let me have use of one of their computers. Thanks Reading.

Last minute jitters before my speech as usual. Do you have to be controversial to be interesting? How many toes will I step on? Someone described my speech here would be like Joshua addressing the walls of Jericho. My biblical knowledge is too scant for me to understand fully what he meant but it sounds bad for me. More later if a) I survive and b) I can find a free computer terminal at Heathrow.

Incidentally here are the words of the British politician responsible for libraries, David Lammy. The bit I really like is his attack on self-appointed,unelected, unrepresentative groups. In other words he's sick of people who disagree with his vision. Aren't we all?

Books V Computers

Which brings me to another issue that is regularly kicked around in library circles. What are libraries for?

The Concise Oxford Dictionary describes a library as a “collection of books for use by the public …….or a similar collection of films, records, computer routines {sic}, etc”.

That’s a dry definition of course. What I really think libraries are about are people; both as individuals and as members of communities. And libraries are there to serve a multiplicity of people’s needs.

So I get heartily tired of self-appointed, un-elected, un-representative groups who dogmatically say that libraries are for this and not for that.

I love reading. Coming from a household where you could count the number of books on the figures of two hands, I celebrate libraries central mission of the promotion of the enjoyment of reading. Bookstart – great! Summer Reading Challenge – fantastic! Adult reading groups in public libraries – absolutely wonderful!

But libraries are not just about books. They never have been. And the digital resources at our disposal today have broadened immeasurably the kind of public services that they can provide.

Again, let’s look at this in a “House” context. The last time you wanted to check a reference in Hansard, did you wade through a 6 inch pile of paper copies? What you probably did is to search on a database capable of bringing up a series of matches in seconds. I repeat, why should the public want anything less efficient for their information needs.

Post script - I survived.

I had dinner last night with the editor-in-chief of Tagesspiegel, Berlin's leading newspaper. On searching for the link I came across this article. I met Joachim Fest when he came to London to promote his book about the last days of the Third Reich Inside Hitler's Bunker. He was a brilliant man, a brilliant historian and a brilliant writer. Amazingly, his entry in Wikipedia has already been updated.

At the dinner we were discussing the Natascha Kampusch TV interview and the widely held belief that no person could have been so composed after such an ordeal and that therefore this was not her but an actress. I suppose this falls into the conspiracy theory genre which includes the (non)moon landing, Elvis Presley is dead, Lady Diana was murdered but who knows...

Later today we have the first international sales conference of Macmillan Medical Communications, our newest publishing venture. Our first wave of launches are in Latin America, India, Japan, Spain, Turkey and Asia-Pacific. Our aim is to become the number one in this field within five years and the number one for quality from day one. I'll keep you up to date with our progress.

Another sad end-of-Summer moment. The last cricket match of the season at Marsh Baldon in beautiful Oxfordshire. It has not been a vintage season - played 9, won 4, lost 4, drawn 1. Honours go to Paul Denning (438 runs from 7 innings including a 173 not out and an average of 87.6); James Cookson (69 overs, 13 wickets average 15.46); Geoff Penington (our youngest player who took 7 wickets at 6.43); and our oldest newcomer Tim Coates (5 wickets from 11 overs at 9.4). And the greatest honour and thanks to the team's only full professor and almost full-time organiser Robert Denning. We won this last game resoundingly - always important to end on a high.

A busy week ahead. A speech at National Acquisitions Group Annual Conference in Reading; participating in a panel on the development of the Asian market at the grandly titled Global Information Industry Summit in Amsterdam; a meeting of the British Library Strategy Advisory Committee; and of course the usual round of Macmillan businesses including the launch of the 2oth edition of Barry Turner's Writer's Handbook.

I hate nationalism, jingoism, chauvinism, patriotism and all the isms which have led to human misery. As a result I find it hard to get excited by being a citizen of the country of my birth. However, there are certain things which make me (in spite of myself) proud to be British. Yesterday evening the BBC broadcast The Last Night of the Proms, the final concert in the 2006 season. Of course there are similar concerts elsewhere and I suspect the standards are as high or higher. Of course some of the flag-waving and cheering is silly. But there is something about the BBC's continuing commitment to supporting music and musical appreciation that is neither self-righteous nor patronising. It is simply the right thing to do and they do it brilliantly.

Incidentally the guy who runs the Proms is Nick Kenyon. I first met him around 1980 when I was responsible for Oxford Journals. One of the key journals was Early Music. It was edited by its founder, a brilliant musicologist from New Zealand called John Thomson. He edited the journal brilliantly but it constantly lost money and there were innumerable glitches and feuds. He had a staff of ten including picture researchers, in-house copy editors etc - all for a quarterly journal. My job was to try to turn round the finances of the journal which inevitably involved cutting staff. Every suggestion I made was met by the assertion that all cost savings would result in the collapse of editorial standards. After any number of rows and heart-searching John eventually decided to leave and by the best luck in the world we were able to hire Nick Kenyon to replace him. He cut the staff from ten to two, regularised the publication schedule, maintained editorial standards and turned the journal from a cash leaker into a cash generator within two years. The journal is still the best in its field and I bet it still makes money. You don't have to lose money to have the highest editorial standards - it just takes a good editorial manager.

My two book recommendations of the moment are both transantlantic, both by women and both titles incorporate an apostrophe. Go check out Elisabeth Hyde's The Abortionist's Daughter and Claire Messud's The Emperor's Children.

I am in the middle of preparing for a speech I am giving this week to a big conference of librarians. If you want to have input into what I'm going to say let me know fast.

My post about the disparity in interest between science and publishing generated some interesting comments. However, I know that most readers don't go back to previous postings and read the comments. So I am going to paste in one from Timo Hannay which says what I think but much more coherently:

Before anything else I thought I'd share with you an old piece of news which I'd hate to think you might have missed.

Greetings from sunny Stuttgart. Last night I had dinner with colleagues from the finance and M&A departments of Holtzbrinck. The 'controller' for Macmillan was there and here are his memories:

'Having had dinner in a typically Swabian Weinstube in down-town Stuttgart we were just about to leave. At that moment a very attractive, open-minded lady came to our table just having been eavesdropping our conversation. She introduced herself and conceded that she was listening to our talks for quite a while. She told us that she was looking for a British man to take her to the UK - and she made very clear that she knows what she wants: A British man, middle-aged, grey-haired, living in London and by the way, he should be wealthy. She seemed to be quite desperate. Last year she got to know a British man looking like Hugh Grant, living near Basingstoke. She found her presumed love for life via the online partner agency Parship - what are the odds? But in the end (after 4 weeks) it didn't work out.

Richard, the landlord of Parship UK, couldn't really bring himself to take her with him to London and to offer her a job (maybe as his new assistant?) and of course free living. So he made a deal with her: He promised her to get a three months' free access to Parship to find the right British man.

Will see what happens...for further report.'

If I write an entry about new writing (average readership of a first-time novelist maybe 500 people if they're lucky) or UK bookselling (average value of an account to an independent bookseller for Macmillan Distribution thus including publishers such as Bloomsbury, Walker Books, Guinness etc but excluding sales through wholesalers, less than £2000 per annum) we get a full postbag of comments and private emails to me. Whenever I write about science (average readership of a highly complex paper in Nature 15,000, total registered users 2 million) there is a resounding silence. The two cultures still operate. Why is it that book publishing only rarely closes the gap?

In any event I promised you more about our Science Foo Camp and here is the link. For those who can't be bothered to go there here is one para that sums it up:

Science Foo was the best conference I can remember in my life, and I've been to a lot of them... Thinking about what made this Foo different from all other conferences, I realized that people brought their whole selves to this conference, their hopes, foibles, humor, outrageousness, brilliance, good intent, and little to no ego in the "look at me" sense. It was fantastic.

Here are some excerpts from a review of Hugh Paxton's novel Homunculus in the The Star newspaper in Johannesburg ( I cannot find the link to the review itself):

Apologies for starting with the back end of this novel, but Hugh Paxton’s afterword bears quoting. “I’m proud to say” writes this splendidly immodest British journalist, ‘”that Homunculus is probably the most bizarre work of fiction ever to emerge from the African continent (African presidents’ memoirs and autobiographies excepted).” Bizarre it certainly is. Also horribly political incorrect and remorselessly downbeat on our current continent.

In Paxton’s defence, let me say at once that he’s cynical not only about Afro-lunacy, but also about everyone who sticks their nose into our affairs, do-gooders not excepted. These include foreign mercenaries (South Africans especially); foreign intelligence agencies, foreign correspondents (such as Paxton himself); UN aid agencies and ‘peacekeeping’ forces; and the Japanese doomsday cult Aum Shinrikyo (remember Tokyo subway sarin gas attack?). Even those with frankly commercial – okay, homicidal as well – involvement are not spared Paxton’s satire...

...I well recall the impact Tom Sharpe made on the literary scene in 1971 with   his first novel, Riotous Assembly, set in the “Piemburg” of those days. Where Kommandant van Heerden of the SAP longed for the heart of an English gentleman. Published at the height of apartheid, its fierce mockery exposed the idiocy at the heart of the system.