I was sent this link today by the US media investment bankers DeSilva and Phillips. It is an in-depth review of mergers and acquisitions activity in the media sector. They conclude that:

“the year 2006 has turned out to be not merely strong, but also a year of extraordinary deal-making in both quality and quantity.  A dollar volume of $20.5 billion in media transactions makes 2006 the strongest year since 2000, and close in volume even to that year’s total.” 

Within the report they predict that there will be trends towards the privatisation of public companies and the acquisition of US media companies by Europeans on the back of improved European economis and a strong euro. They also predict that 2007 will be even more active than 2006.

It is, of course, great to know that we are involved in an industry with so much activity. The trouble is that all this wheeling and dealing comes with significant costs - lawyers, bankers, accountants, disruption, redundancies, strategy consultants, headhunters, stockbrokers. At the same time the industry needs to invest more in transforming its activities from print to digital and customers are demanding ever better value for money. Somewhere there is a mismatch.

On a more parochial level it is remarkable that a blog I did recently about independent bookselling in the UK has generated 24 comments and quite a deal of heat addressed at publishers, supermarkets, Internet booksellers, and the Booksellers Association and its executives. It's good to see the debate and I understand the fears and concerns of independent booksellers. I do wish, however, that some of the commentators would try to understand the issues facing those they attack.

Publishers owe it to their authors to maximise sales of their books. In the 21st century this must involve sales through supermarkets, through Amazon, through chain bookshops as well as through traditional independent booksellers. The value chain and costs for each of these channels is different and complex. Publishers don't grant higher discounts than they need to and they certainly want to see the continuance of as many routes to market as possible.

Supermarkets need to serve their customers. Part of that service involves the supply of books as well as magazines, food, clothes etc. They also need to offer best value. They can achieve this by being able to sell very large quantities efficiently and that is certainly the case with best selling books. Publishers would be seen as very elitist if they didn't see the supermarket shopper as a potential customer for books.

Amazon and other Internet booksellers have generated new sales for authors by the re-invigoration of the 'long tail', by sophisticated algorithmic market research, and by heavy investment in customer service, technology and marketing.

The BA tries to represent all those organisations who sell books in the UK and Ireland. To shun certain booksellers because they are not 'independent' or 'traditional' would be daft. Of course it must be difficult for its executives to satisfy all its members all the time but that's true of every organisation from the local Parish Council to the United Nations. I think the BA gives booksellers a fantastic service and deserves 100% support from all interested in the security and development of the book market.

If you have half an hour - or even a few minutes - to spare, go to BBC Radio 4, switch on the volume control, scroll down to 'You've never had it so good' and listen to a fascinating programme written and narrated by Peter Hennessy about our former chairman, Harold Macmillan. If nothing else (but there is plenty else) it's worth it for his delivery.

Over the weekend I read the proofs of a book we are publishing in April. It is by the journalist and sports writer Matthew Engel and it is a selection from his obsessive collection of red notebooks. Every page had something on it which made me smile or think. Great lines such as 'Australia, the land that foreplay forgot' (Germaine Greer);'In the history of the world, no one ever washed a rented car' (Lawrence Summers); 'After two years in Washington, I missed the sincerity and genuineness of Hollywood' (Fred Thompson); and so much more. Place your orders now.

I wrote yesterday about Jeffrey Archer's new book. Here is the cover. It is the first time his name does not appear on the front of one of his books.

There's a story in today's Sunday Times about Jeffrey Archer's next book, The Gospel According to Judas, which he is writing along with the distinguished theologian and author, Frank Moloney.

I'm pretty certain that a significant number of people will demonstrate their unshakable prejudices about Lord Archer but I am proud to be publishing this book (on March 20th worldwide) and I know it is ruthlessly scholarly, entertaining and important.

Perusing the print edition of this week's Bookseller I came across this wonderful sentence:

There is much gnashing of teeth in the trade press about the future of independent bookselling. Indeed, whenever I write anything about sales of books in the UK I get a lot of comments and correspondence attacking us (and other publishers) for undermining independent booksellers by granting too high discounts to chains, supermarkets and Amazon. The Bookseller magazine has carried many excellent articles on the subject but I think this angry and forthright letter published by them yesterday deserves to be widely debated and I've appended a few paragraphs from it. I don't agree with Mr Foster's conclusions (nor his views on the Booksellers Association)  but I do think we need to address the issue more formally than through the Bookseller or this blog:

Independents are the key

I refer to Jonathan Spencer-Payne's recent letter (The Bookseller, 1st December) in which he forecast that there would be no independent bookshops in 20 years. While I agree with most of what he says, I do think he's being rather optimistic. I know of three which have closed relatively recently and two that are in difficulty in our region...

...The independents are the seedbeds of the business and the custodians of our literary culture. They subsidise the discounts given so generously by the publishers to the chains, supermarkets and internet booksellers. They are the de facto agents (unpaid) for Book Tokens, which are hidden by the chains (which prefer to sell their own vouchers), and they keep the wholesalers in business.

They are run in the main by sensible people who do not owe the banks hundreds of millions of dollars. They support a comatose and ineffectual trade organisation whose chief executive is never heard or seen promoting bookshops in the media.

When the independents go, the lot goes, and it'll be sooner than you think. The chains will never, ever be able to compete with the supermarkets and the internet. Happy New Year.

Philip Foster
Owner, The Tolsey Bookshop & Stationers
Tetbury, Glos GL8 8JG

I'm indebted to Peter Collingridge for pointing me to a cost-free solution to analysis of visitors to this blog. I'm also grateful to Google and the Macmillan IT department for making it possible. Here are a couple of the charts available.

The surprise here is that I'd assumed a significant proportion of visitors were coming from India but the pattern is very similar to the standard geographical distribution of sales of an academic monograph.

What can I say about this one? Thank you Susan Hill and thank you Grumpy.

On a very sad note I have just heard of the death of William Armstrong, formerly Managing Director of Sidgwick and Jackson and a great publisher and mentor to many. There will be in-depth obituaries in the trade press by people who knew him intimately. All I can say is that he never once lost his enthusiasm for publishing good books well and commercially. As a result of William's retiring style, there are no pictures of him on Google Images so I'll have to wait for the Bookseller archives to dig something up.

And finally, Publishers Weekly has reported on the AMS Chapter 11 which I wrote about last week. What I hadn't realised was the quantum of potential damage. Random House is owed $43m and the next four (Simon & Schuster, Hachette, Penguin, HarperCollins) around $80m between them. I'm not sure what the total profitability of these top five businesses in the USA is but I'd be surprised if it exceeded the sum of these liabilities. Let's hope that AMS keep their word and allow the non-US parts of the business to trade without depriving them of cash to pay suppliers.

At this time of year the media world is awash with predictions. The Booksellers Association runs a blog authored by (I prefer 'written by') Martyn Daniels. It's well worth investigating but just in case you're not up to clicking post holiday celebrations here are his predictions for our industry in 2007:

• Macmillan’s audio MP3 player. Whether it is a promotional gimmick or the next audio format is immaterial as it will certainly create noise and stir others into action in this obvious format area.
• 508 compliance which may seem a million miles away to us Brits but signals a new impetus to audio, web site design and will help bodies such as the RNIB in its cause.
• New technology, in the form of OLED screens, or the Hearst reader.
• The announcement and initial roll out of a new distribution environment and services to support digital content within the existing channel.
• The start of real POD services based not on short print runs but distributed printing at affordable prices. Maybe a BOD (bind on demand) model to support customised printing.
• Richer and richer bibliographic services and the need for every publisher to engage in its provision, even if they don’t sell digital content.
• Increased importance of Internet sales, emarketing and community engagement and participation. Success will be achieved increasingly by engagement and word of mouth than wallpapering web pages with books and offers.
• Omnivore fears will stoke more publishers to join their ranks but major publishers will continue to build their repositories and control their digital assets.
• Booksellers will increasingly sell old, used, new and digital side by side. Currency is only one aspect of selection and selection is what booksellers have always done best.

Change in publishing is definitely in the air but some things change more slowly than others. This photo of our Basingstoke offices dates from the 1980s and nothing has changed.

In my January 1 entry I published our blog statistics for 2006 including a challenge for our IT department:

This blog has now completed a full year. In December we had 60,400 visits down from 63,375 in November (the effect of the holiday season I hope rather than anything sinister). This brings the total for the year to 399,947, tantalisingly close to a milestone. With the statistics software I have I cannot tell how many of these are unique, nor how many are from Macmillan employees. Maybe next year our IT department can come up with a zero-cost way of answering these questions.

IT have now responded and it turns out that during the year we served 46,327 distinct hosts. Some hosts will represent many unique visitors but at least I now know that there have been a significant number of 'uniques'.

This is the scene outside the Pan Bookshop. It wasn't just the trees which were selling like hot cakes. The list below is their top ten books sold by volume in the last four weeks of the 2006.It doesn't tally very well with the bestseller lists in the papers but neither, I guess, does the clientele.

1. Dangerous Book for Boys - Conn and Hal Iggulden

2. Previous Convictions - A.A.Gill

3. Suite Francaise - Irene Nemirovsky

4. North Face of Soho (volume 4 of Unreliable Memoirs) - Clive James

5. Amo Amas Amat - Harry Mount

6. Debrett's Etiquette for Girls - Fleur Britten

7. God Delusion - Richard Dawkins

8. The Kensington Book - Carolyn Starren

9. Made in Italy - Giorgio Locatelli

10. Daughter of the Desert (Gertrude Bell) - Georgina Howell

And the manager wanted me to mention two distinguished also rans:

Sorrows of the Moon - Iqbal Ahmed -- privately published in 2004 but sold 100 copies in the shop this year.

Concorde - Frederic Beniada - at £40 this was in the top five revenue generators for the shop.

I have deliberately not linked any of these titles in order to encourage you to visit (at 158 Fulham Road SW10 9PR) or order by post or e-mail (panbookshop@btclick.com) from the Pan Bookshop.

On the blog transparency front I can now report that up to 31 December Macmillan has earned $109.73 from the ads carried on this site. The cash will apparently be arriving on 5 February, so look out for a major splurge.

And finally last week I wrote about Trinity, Cambridge, my entrance interview and subsequent undistinguished career. Someone has sent me this photo of the intake of 1967 which has me just two rows below my fellow new boy Prince Charles. His university career wasn't much more distinguished than mine but he's certainly got more press coverage.