Yesterday the highest number of visitors came to this blog after searching for Riverdeep or Houghton Mifflin. This is because it was announced that the former had bought the latter for $3.5 billion. I know very little about Riverdeep but HM is clearly a great publishing company with a long tradition and excellent books but it's hard to figure about the commercial logic of the price. HM has changed hands several times and, apart from the doomed Vivendi escapade, sellers have made money at every turn. Presumably the private equity owners will have extracted cash and no doubt hordes of professional advisers will have sent in astronomical bills for their wisdom. But who, in the end, pays for all this? Publishing is not an easy-profit business and bookbuyers (general or educational) are not flush with cash. I wish the team good luck but I fear Riverdeep might find the mountain rather high to climb.

Yesterday afternoon I visited Nature Publishing Group's industrial-chic new offices in Varick Street in downtown Manhattan.

The offices are brilliant and by chance I was able to participate in a meeting with a hugely important medical society. It reminded me what the business is about and I was further reminded by Jonathan Eisen's blog where he commends Nature for its foresight:

When you're wide awake at 3am in a New York hotel you tend to review the previous day's work. I and a number of colleagues spent the whole day in a meeting room in the wonderful and refurbished (thank goodness) Flatiron Building

at board meetings of the various Holtzbrinck USA companies - St Martin's Press, Henry Holt, Farrar Straus Giroux, Picador, Tor, Audio Renaissance, Bedford, Freeman, Worth and others. It was an awesome display of American publishing and innovation. Although each of the businesses is independent and follows its own editorial and market development there were some common themes. Technology. The need for continuous improvement in quality and efficiency. Flexibility and the ability to move fast. Price pressures. The absolute requirement for growth. The size and vitality of the US market make it a world to itself. At the end of it I was completely shattered!

Of course, the business of America is business but it's not a monopoly. Europe, through business schools like INSEAD, is fighting back. Steve Rutt writes about our latest initiative.

INSEAD Business Press is a partnership between INSEAD, one of the world's leading business schools and Palgrave Macmillan. The combination represents a dream ticket with significant global reach and has the ambition to publish high quality, innovative and influential books that will inform debates for people in business and at business and management schools worldwide.

INSEAD was founded in 1957 in the Forest of Fontainebleau, not far from the famous chateau and has established itself around a unique global perspective and multicultural diversity that is reflected in research and teaching with two main campuses at Fontainebleau in France and Singapore in Asia.

There has been significant collaboration between INSEAD and Palgrave Macmillan on a number of projects including the INSEAD story, "INSEAD: From Intuition to Institution by Jean-Louis Barsoux;

INSEAD Business Press represents a new level of partnership with the first three books on topical and compelling subjects, "Service is Front Stage" by James Teboul, "The Marking Enterprise" by Jean-Claude Thoenig and Charles Waldman and "Mergers: Leadership, Performance and Corporate Health" by David Fubini, Colin Price and Maurizio Zollo.

Spring 2007 will see a new book by one of Europe's leading business gurus, Manfed Kets de Vries

and his team at the INSEAD Global Leadership Centre "Coach or Couch: The Psychology of Making Better Leaders"

In a world with many business and management books the unique positioning of INSEAD Business Press is for rigorous yet accessible, perhaps bringing to mind the words of Albert Einstein:

"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler"

As Richard is currently laptop-less in New York, so has asked me to post about the Pan Macmillan effort at the annual PEN Quiz on Monday night.

For those of you that don't know, PEN is an international organisation which "exists to promote friendship and intellectual co-operation among writers everywhere, to fight for freedom of expression and represent the conscience of world literature."  The fundraising quiz was organised by Jonathan Heawood, the director of English PEN, who, as always, did a wonderful job.  The great and the good of the media and publishing worlds made up 36 teams, and rolled up to the Cafe Royal in Piccadilly to do battle.  The teams included delagations from The Times, The Mail on Sunday, Daily Mail, Daily Telegraph, Hodder, Penguin, Faber, Orion and Random House.  Quiz 'mistress' for the night was Mariella Frostrup, whilst the not so dulcet tones of Piers Morgan were employed for the raffle.

To properly set the scene, I should mention that Pan Macmillan were the winners of last year's quiz, in a tense tie-break situation.  So, our reputation was on the line, and it was with some relief that we came in at third place, after HarperCollins, and quiz sponsors, Colman Getty PR.  Those of us with a sweet tooth were particularly delighted with the third place result, as the prize was a box of luxury chocolates from Hotel Chocolat.

Congrats to all the Pan Mac team, which consisted of Booker-winning author Alan Hollinghurst, William Fiennes (author of The Snow Geese), Tim Dowling (author of The Giles Wareing Haters' Club, which Picador will publish next June), Tim Adams (Observer journalist and future Picador author, and James Walton, who won the tie-break for the team last year.  There was some controversy at the time, with shouts of 'Ringer' flying about the place, but for the information of those who might wonder about the connection, he is the cousin of our Deputy Picador Publisher, Ursula Doyle. In house team members were Richard Milner (team captain), Andrew Kidd, Camilla Elworthy, Ursula Doyle and Emma Giacon.  Can't wait till next year...!

This comes to you from the offices of Scientific American on Madison Avenue.

'SciAm' has been part of the Holtzbrinck group since the 1980s and has grown every year since. The big challenges now are to maintain our print subscribers and advertisers while building for an Internet future. Fortunately, wherever technology leads editorial standards will drive reader loyalty and we have the best editorial team around - unsurprising perhaps given that SciAm is the world's leading scientific magazine for the general reader.

Apart from publishing every month SciAm is also involved in major awards such as SA 50 (for the 50 researchers, businesses and policy leaders who have made a difference) and the Weizmann Women and Science award won by Dr May Berenbaum pictured here (centre - n.b. British spelling).

And I've been reminded to mention the fast-growing magazine Scientific American Mind. More on New York and other things later.

This is a plug. In the office this morning before leaving for New York I tore my trousers. Staples could only hold the seat together on a very temporary basis. Arrived at Heathrow Terminal 4 just in time to buy a new pair.

Went to the first shop (after deliberately avoiding Harrod's)to catch my eye, Hackett. Rita Vittorio (who has worked for Hackett for eight years) served me and rapidly found some appropriate corduroys. Unfortunately they were too long in the leg and there was no way I could find time or tailors in NY to fix them. Without hesitation and with a great smile she pulled out some needle and thread and shortened them on the spot. I'm posting this in the hope that Hackett realize that Rita is the tops at customer service; that the sort of thing she did makes a company great and profitable; and that they reward her.

If she is typical of Hackett employees then they deserve as much business as possible and I'll certainly be buying trousers there next time I have a similar disaster!

I've been reading proofs of a book close to my heart. It's called Beyond authority and was commissioned by the business editor at Palgrave Macmillan, Stephen Rutt. It is written by a brilliant leader, Julia Middleton, the CEO of Common Purpose (of whose UK trustees I am chair). You can hear and watch Julia talking about the book at the Meet the author website.

The book is about the real-life situations where leadership, reporting lines, ability to command or control simply don't exist. We may think we have authority but the truth is that rarely, if ever, is that the case. Traditional management theories relate to a world which doesn't exist, where organograms actually reflect power lines, where job titles are thought to reflect reality and so on. To lead successfully in the real world we all have to use other techniques - of influence, of example. of understanding, of belief but rarely of diktat.

I strongly recommend the book but the reason for mentioning it is that I'm recovering from the humiliation of both England's rugby and cricket teams' defeats over the weekend. In recent times both were triumphant. They are well funded, well trained, talented, committed. The main thing that has changed in both cases is the leadership. The captains of the teams are great players and great people but somehow they're leading losing teams. Perhaps I should send them (or more likely their successors) copies of Julia's book when it comes out in February.

Getting it right is as much about many small things as grand strategies. I probably irritate the hell out of colleagues with messages about apparently trivial matters.

A little while ago I did a presentation on the technological changes which have affected the dictionary business - relational databases, XML, on-line and CD delivery, voive recognition, corpus searching etc. I had picked up a small Langenscheidt dictionary as a prop and realised that the single most important advance from a casual user point of view was none of these things. It was the rounding of the corners of the plastic cover so that you didn't suffer cuts from the sharp edges. A small matter in some ways but a significant publishing decision.

One of the most important devices which has enabled the web to develop is the stapler. Imagine the chaos if we didn't staple documents printed from the web.

Similarly I've just been given a brilliant new cookbook, A year in my kitchen by Skye Gingell who is head chef at Petersham Nurseries. You can find some recipes from the book here but you might also buy the book. I have yet to test the recipes myself but I assume they all work. The design of the book is great as one would expect from Quadrille Publishing. But what really struck me was that the book has three silk bookmarks so that one can index three recipes (starter, main, dessert presumably) simultaneously. Clever.

And finally a novelist who is steadily moving up the charts - C.J.Sansom. Winter in Madrid is just out in paperback - start there and then work your way back through the rest of his historical novels. The 'small thing' here is that his success has been achieved by long-term editorial commitment and attention to to every detail of his publication. The 'big thing' of course is that C.J. can write and entertain.

Publishing News has a regular slot for strange book titles. Yesterday's one seemed appropriate - How You Can Bowl Better Using Self-hypnosis. I wish, I wish that the England cricket management had issued our team with copies. For a concentrated precis of the humiliation so far treat yourself to this scorecard.

Extraordinary scenes at Waterstone's Piccadilly last night where fans had queued to buy signed copies of Dirty Blonde by the previously-blogged Courtney Love. In spite of her reputation (or maybe because of it) she was utterly professional and took real trouble to talk to fans and to answer questions intelligently and honestly. She has undertaken a huge amount of promotion this week and this BBC link only shows a fraction of the media exposure. What is more, the book is a treasure.

Bondomania is rife since the release of Casino Royale. Who knows what the film's box-office takings. At a much lower level I was delighted to see an advance copy of our Casino Royale specially adapted (and with audio CDs) for learners of English. It's part of our Macmillan Readers which has annual sales of millions of copies and which has helped enhance literacy and English speaking throughout the world. I remember reading Casino Royale (illegally) under the bedclothes at boarding school. It's great to know the tradition continues.

The controversy which we discussed last week was subdued by Rupert Murdoch's intervention although I'm not sure there was any resolution of the principles being debated. Just in case you haven't seen it here is the cover of the book. The typography says it all.

I am adding a new blog to the blogroll. It is by Martyn Daniels and is hosted by the Booksellers Association. I am sure it will be interesting. In yesterday's entry he discusses the fairness or otherwise of royalties payable on digital delivery of books. It is at present a purely hypothetical issue but we are establishing the ground rules for the future which makes it important.

'If artists hold back on digital rights and publishers don’t equitably share the potential increased margin they potentially hold back the creation of the market which after all can’t be built in a vacuum.'

The problem is that no 'artist' or publisher has ever believed that he or she is receiving a fair share. I remember a high-level meeting about this issue where we (publishers) presented what we considered to be a very generous offer including a first principle that whatever happened in the future 'the author should not be disadvantaged financially'. This principle was immediately rejected as being unfair to authors. This argument will run and run.

This little boy was snapped on the Castillo stand at the recent Mexican Children's Book Fair. That's what this business is all about