Prospect magazine is the brainchild of David Goodhart, its editor. It was launched in 1995 and has been described as  "more readable than the Economist, more relevant than the Spectator, more romantic than the New Statesman." They have just launched a blog and I was invited to contribute a piece on scientific publishing. In the process of writing the piece I rediscovered the difficulties of explaining a complex situation in very few words and of typing more than one sentence on a Blackberry in the departures lounge at Bangalore Airport.

One theory of success in publishing is that the chances of survival are directly linked to intelligent property policy. Faber's ownership of its offices in Queen Square, Souvenir Press's office in Great Russell Street have helped the companies through difficult times. John Murray's wonderful Albemarle Street offices allowed it to hold on to its independence for more than two centuries.

This article from the New York Times suggests that our Nature team in New York are following an equally sensible property policy. And here are photos of their brilliant (and economic) offices.

As we all know, India is almost perfect. The economy is booming. The human resource is adapatable and plentiful. The food is outstanding. However, every institution can improve and I have four recommendations to put to the Indian Parliament.

1. Move the time zone 30 minutes forward or backward so that dimwitted and jet-lagged foreigners know what the time is when they wake up. Try subtracting 5 and a half hours from the local time.

2. Abolish lakhs (100,000) and crores (10.000,000) except for literary and poetic use.

3. Introduce the New Rupee which is 100 Old Rupees.

4. Persuade British Airways to invest in more than one phone per check-in staff.

I estimate these amendments would increase India's GDP by at least one percentage point.

I am indebted to Tim Coates for the following costs of borrowing a book from libraries in various parts of London. The cost is derived by simply dividing the total costs of library provision in the area by the number of loans. Both the absolute costs (it would be cheaper simply to give the books away?) and the variations suggest that there are huge savings to be made which could lead to enhanced book stocks and even better service.

Camden £11.50
Greenwich £7.14
Hackney £10.07
Hammersmith £6.63
Islington £10.46
Kensington £8.54
Lambeth £10.29
Lewisham £5.77
Southwark £6.89
Tower Hamlets £9.90
Wandsworth £3.64
Westminster £5.91

And finally the mission statement from the only cafe in Bangalore Airport:

To be the best cafe chain by offering a world class coffee experience at affordable prices.

I'm thinking of adapting this for the Baldons Cricket Club which has been obliged by some new regulation to invent a constitution. To be the best village cricket team offering excellent teas at affordable prices. Shame about the pavilion and the pitch.

I wrote a little while ago about the funeral for William Armstrong. Here is a link to an excellent obituary in The Independent.

The riots in Bangalore have subsided. The row over Shilpa Shetty is simmering but not explosive. Today's big news is that the Indian cricket manager, Greg Chappell, has been assaulted for failing to select anyone from Orissa State in the Indian team. When he took the job I can imagine Chappell had a few concerns - selection, fitness, opposition, poitical tension - but I don't suppose being beaten up at an airport was one of them.

The other thing he would never have predicted is that the BCCI the Indian cricket board would grant TV rights to an operation which has resulted in the most popular sports entertainment for a billion people not being available to half of them. That is even worse than not selecting anyone from beautiful Orissa. 

As the plane prepared to descend the BA steward reminded us to clear the area around our seats of ALL materials - 'including books and other debris'. I sometimes think we're in the paper recycling industry but debris...?

Of course the big news story here is Shilpa Shetty and Big Brother.

The media in Bangalore and across the sub-continent are having the time of their lives attacking British TV, British racism, British manners, and celebrity idiocy - and affirming the superiority of Indian culture. I agree with them.

The other headlines today were all about the riots in East Bangalore where an 11-year-old boy was killed and a curfew imposed. In the West we hear a great deal about violence in the Middle East (of course) and we make a great deal out of, for instance, the riots in Paris. We tend to view India as a vibrantgrowing democratic economy. India has issues too and they are not far below the surface.

But the more positive side of India is evident in today's Bangalore newspaper where the bulk of the ads are from Australian universities trawling for the best students. The world is, indeed, flat.

I'm off to Bangalore later today. This is not one of our offices there.

But this is one of the six buildings we occupy in the city.

We employ around 1500 people in Bangalore and 3000 plus in India as a whole. The business is divided into several divisions and the divisions into units. This is essential for manageability but inevitably introduces complexity.In the two days I am there I'll be attending thirteen separate board or executive meetings, each dealing with a separate strategic business unit. And when I leave I bet we'll have created some new ones too.

I came across this badly reproduced Quentin Blake cartoon for the Pan Bookshop. In spite of competition from the supermarkets, the Internet, silly discounts at chain booksellers, and the inanities of publishers, our little independent bookshop managed to record reasonable sales, better stock turn, a decent profit and many happy customers. The devilish Pan must be smiling on us. Hooray - and phew.

One of the key technologies impacting the book industry is on-demand printing and Ingram's Lightning Source is a leading supplier. A Macmillan production manager visited their factory recently and brought back this photo. When he asked the plant manager what went on in that particular department, the response was R&R. Now we know.

I attended another meeting yesterday focussing on the problems besetting the British public library system. Tim Coates has written about it on his Good Library Blog. I was delighted to see his reference to my old friend William of Ockham. Not much is known about his life except that he was born in Ockham in Surrey and the medieval church there has had a stained glass window of him installed.

The paintings of him aren't very helpful but here's a colourful one looking rather like a cartoon monk.

What I really like about him is the vagueness of it all. His name is spelt several different ways. According to this brilliant article in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy he wasn't the originator of his famous philosophical razor concept, nor did he even use the word 'razor'. The concept is written in Latin - entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem - and can be interpreted in any number of subtly different ways.

"All things being equal, the simplest solution tends to be the best one."

"Simpler theories are, other things being equal, generally better than more complex ones.

"Don't multiply entities beyond necessity."

"Plurality should not be assumed without necessity."

“It is useless to do with more what can be done with less.”

The amount of hot air being expended on library funding, management and objectives might be significantly reduced by the application of old Bill Occam's razor and a review based on these five Occamesque observations from Tim Coates.

-  The library service is for people and its only purpose is to respond to their needs  (currently it does not do this adequately)

-  It is essentially about reading  (currently it is not sufficiently so)

-  Its operation must be simple (because at present it is too complex)

-- Those responsible for providing the service are those who work in the libraries (currently they are not able to be).

-- Those accountable to the public are councillors  (currently they do not account).

And please may we ignore for this exercise other bons mots such as 'The devil is in the detail' or Einstein's "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not one bit simpler."

Bill's contemporary version is "Keep it simple, stupid" and I suggest that all library acronymic participants adopt this as their mission statement.

Yesterday I attended a meeting organised by the Booksellers Association to discuss the opportunities and threats posed to the book trade as a whole by the shifting sands of technology and consumer behaviour. The meeting was conducted under the Chatham House rule but it was agreed that the findings and discussions will be widely communicated as soon as the materials are put in order. I shall not jump the gun but, while listening, my mind kept going back to an interview which I blogged a few days ago. It generated a lot of comments from independent booksellers as the 'mystery entrepreneur' challenged many preconceptions about our industry and bookselling in particular. However, it was the last question and answer which has (understandably) made me think hardest:

WW: What about Publishers? Aren’t publishers part of the problem? Shouldn’t they be part of the solution? 

MC: My guess is that somewhere in that solution will be the elimination of “publishers” as we traditionally know them. The only other industry consisting of massively over-compensated mediocre performers who have utterly outlasted their utility and raison d’etre and exist only by virtue of an entrenched, self-protective, bullying autocracy that gangs up against threats posed by obviously more efficient methods that would, could, should and will eliminate them—is Wall Street.

Well, that's telling us. The only consolation is that, for all its sins, I'm pretty certain that Wall Street will survive - and so shall publishers.

Our virtual tour of Macmillan bestsellers takes us to Palgrave Macmillan in the Flatiron Building in New York who have just ended the best year in their history thanks to brilliant publishing and assiduous marketing.

1. The Statesman's Yearbook 2007

One of our most important investments has been the development of the Nature Clinical Practice stable of journals for practising clinicians which we launched in 2004. We undertook a great deal of market research and consulted literally hundreds of eminent physicians about their information needs. I don't think a single one would have identifed the cause of Napoleon's death as a very high priority but now Nature Clinical Practice Gastroenterology and Hepatolgy has cracked it with the publication of the snappily titled and open-access available Napoleon Bonaparte's Gastric Cancer: a clinicopathologic approach to staging, pathogenesis, and etiology. A pithier description will be found here and in any number of tabloid newspapers around the world.

And while on journals from Nature Publishing Group I couldn't resist this extract from Michael Crichton's genetic bestseller, Next:

'Good,good. Make those changes, shoot it back to me, and I'll submit it to Nature. I think this deserves a better platform than Science, which is a little down at heels these days. I'll call over to Nature and make sure the editor understands the importance of this paper, and see that we get immediate publication.'

What greater praise could we receive?

Continuing our round-the-world review of Macmillan bestsellers we reach Macmillan Publishers New Zealand.

1. The Lovely Bones

2. The Collectors

3. Triumph of the Sun

4. Cat o'Nine Tails

5. Science World 9

6. Camel Club

7. Macmillan New Zealand World Atlas

8. My Story: Schappelle Corby

9. Science World 10

10. The Gruffalo whom I couldn't resist showing:

And Chris Baty, who runs Pan Macmillan NZ, sent me these words to accompany the list - thanks Chris:

Kiwis could be regarded as an ornery bunch. Despite being at the bottom of the world and there not being many of them, they have a habit of determinedly doing things their own way.  And this was the way of  New Zealand in 2006. Many retailers would say it was the worst year in a very long time.

As with many parts of the world, 2006 launched to rapidly and frequently rising petrol prices, which continued until the last quarter. With little in the way of public transport - even in the bigger cities, freight being road based, and NZ being a long way from all markets, it meant the impact on the country was sharp. The extra money ordinary folk spent on fuelling their cars to get to work, was the equivalent of the cost of at least one or two books.

Combine this with the Reserve Bank raising the rates of interest each quarter in their efforts to take the steam out of the housing market, which has seen unprecedented growth in the past 2 years to the point where a very average house in Auckland, NZ’s largest city in the north, is going up at the rate of $540 per day! Part of the New Zealand dream is that one owns one’s own home, so a high percentage of the population does just that. Despite their best efforts, the Bank has failed miserably to shatter this dream. Kiwis continue to buy and sell property unabated taking bigger and bigger mortgages at increasing interest rates (floating mortgage rates are 9.55%). The government wails at the amount of money invested in the non-productive housing sector, but for individuals, it is the only reliable investment return they have found. Most ordinary people invest for their old age, of course, but when there is no national superannuation scheme offering tax incentives or employer contributions, why would a madly individual Kiwi not go for something more reliable which they can manage themselves.

Furthermore, when the country’s annual surplus comes in at $40 billion and way more than the government planned in their wildest dreams; when there is a huge skills shortage and record employment levels (unemployment is below 4%), business confidence is on a real high, one could be forgiven for thinking these individual Kiwis would have stopped believing their government who steadfastly claim an overheated economy. And certainly they would not do anything the government exhorted them to, in regards to economic wellbeing.

And mostly this is true – with one exception! The Reserve Bank has cajoled, begged, bullied and threatened New Zealanders to stop spending money, particularly on the ‘plastic fantastic’ (credit cards).  And of all the things they chose to be obedient on, it was shopping at Christmas – especially for books. They indulged minimally!

And so Kiwis maintain their proud tradition of being perverse! Internationally they are best known for it in the sports arena, but they are like it at home too.

Talking of sports arenas – just watch them this year at the Rugby World Cup, the America’s Cup, the Netball World Cup, the Bledisloe Cup (rugby), the Tri-Nations (rugby), and the Softball World Cup. They assure us that local perversity was, of course, proven yet again when they let England win the cricket a few days ago! Anyway they invite you all over to see for yourselves – there will be plenty of cups for everyone this year; there just may not be enough chairs!