The snow didn't reach Eastbourne, the sun came out, all but two of the Pan Macmillan sales conference guests arrived, the hotel was great, speakers were entertaining and on schedule, the food was edible and Andrew Marr reminded us what an extraordinarily interesting history the British have lived since the end of World War II and how lucky we've been - but will the luck hold? We British is published in May alongside a BBC TV series. Keep an eye out for it. It could be the most important history book for a very long time.

But the bulk of the morning session was dedicated not to books being published by us but by other publishers who have chosen to use our sales and distribution operations rather than build their own.

There are two schools of thought about this. When I worked at Reed International Books the view was that if we were good at something (e.g. logistics) the last thing to do would be to share that expertise with a competitor or potential competitor. At Macmillan we take the opposite view. If we do something well we should offer that service to others in order to build more scale and to allow us to invest to ensure we are always one step ahead. An additional benefit is that having outside clients who are free to walk away encourages all our service divisions to adopt a customer-friendly approach to their business for internal as well as outside clients.

We've had enormous sucess in India with information processing, fulfilment and software development, in China with our print sourcing and distribution services, at Macmillan Distribution in the UK and elsewhere. We are now positively developing sales support for client publishers using the highly-regarded Pan Macmillan team. And here are some of the publishers who are innovating, investing and creating great books without having to build their own sales operation. An additional benefit for us is that all this brings us into contact with some of the best people in the industry without our having to hire them.

Spy Publishing - the best reference works for boutique and luxury hotels.

The Friday Project - the best of the web into the best of books - and more.

CAMRA - beer is the new wine and the Campaign for Real Ale is out to ensure improving standards of beer and pubs.

Think Books - linked to magazines published for not-for-profit organisations such as the Campaign for the Protection of Rural England.

Rodale - the number one health and fitness publisher.

Tokyopop - the market leader in the mushrooming Manga market.

Viz books - related closely or not to the perennial Viz magazine.

There are many shades of sales conference. I'm just off to the annual Pan Macmillan one. After a couple of years of hauling everyone to London we decided to move to the seaside - Eastbourne on the South Coast of England. This is what it looks like in the Summer.

We've invited a stellar cast of authors and booked the Grand Hotel built in 1875 and almost certainly still using the original plumbing. I believe tonight will  be a black tie affair which is definitely in keeping with the surroundings.

The only problem is that at 3 o'clock this morning it started to snow. Train schedules are at risk. Roads will be blocked. It doesn't take much to bring Southern England to a halt but I'm pretty sure our teams will battle through. I'm setting off now and hope to be 'enjoying' the beach later today rather like this lot. Not quite Bondi Beach but the best we can do in England in February.

Audible is the brainchild of Don Katz, a former journalist who recognised early the potential market for downloadable audio and built a company to serve that market. He has been immeasurably helped by an exclusive contract to serve Apple's i-tunes audio bookstore. More importantly, it is clear that downloading audiobooks is a much better technology than fiddling about with multiple CDs or tapes and that the next generation of in-car entertainment systems will include the ability to download on the road. The market potential is immense.

Macmillan has a very strong audio list and we now have an agreement with Audible UK to make it available throughout legitimate territories. We're gradually loading up all our titles and first out of the blocks are Wilbur Smith and Colin Dexter's brilliant Inspector Morse novels. I suspect that Desmond Tutu's reading of the The Gospel According to Judas coming out on 20 March might be the Spring bestseller.

From the future to the past. I am a member of the UK Literary Heritage Working Group and we have today launched a website. Our job is to emphasise the importance of literary archives as part of Britain's scholarly, cultural and educational heritage. While part of our remit is to develop ways of capturing digital archives it is also vital to hang on to manuscripts and papers from great contemporary and not so contemporary writers.

Last night we had a small gathering in my office to welcome a new member of our team, Vikram Savkar, and the beginnings of a completely new venture, Nature Education. Rather than reproduce our press release I've copied in a piece from the leading industry newsletter from Electronic Publishing Services. Another journey begins for our teams.

* Nature Publishing Group has launched Nature Education, a new division that will produce educational resources and tools for science students and teaching staff.  What is the new division’s strategy for this market?

by Kate Worlock, Director

**************************************

In recent years, Nature Publishing Group (NPG) has proven itself to be one of the most innovative scientific publishers, with experiments around open peer review and the launch of services such as Naturejobs.com (the first free scientific recruitment facility online), Nature Network Boston and Connotea.  The company has also demonstrated its desire to move into new markets - the launch of Macmillan Medical Communications and its Dissect Medicine service moved NPG into a strong position in medical publishing, building on the success of its relatively new Nature Clinical Practice medical journals division. 

The latest sector to be addressed is education.  Clearly Nature’s content, through its scientific journals, is already widely used by science professors, but Nature Education aims to provide tools for both teachers and students to facilitate access and use of this existing content, as well as content which is to be created specifically for educational purposes.  The new Publishing Director at Nature Education, Vikram Savkar, who was most recently at Pearson, has recognised the difficulties in addressing the undergraduate textbook market, and believes that “instructors and students are thirsty for learning environments that move beyond traditional textbooks and even course management systems to provide a highly interactive and personalised experience”.

While Nature Education is the group’s first attempt to address educational needs directly, there are plenty of valuable best practices that the new division could draw on from elsewhere in the group to support its activities.  For example, Nature has been working, through services like Nature Network Boston and Dissect Medicine, to develop community applications, and through Connotea to understand how tagging can add value for the end users.  It seems likely that Nature Education will follow in the footsteps of these services to create Web 2.0-style offerings likely to appeal to today’s science students, who have been educated in a very PC- and internet-centric manner.  Nature has also recognised the importance of personalised learning, highlighted in the recent 2020 Vision report on teaching and learning in the UK.  While this focuses on the K-12 age range, there is no reason why the teaching methods discussed could not apply effectively to other age groups.

© Electronic Publishing Services (EPS) 2007

EPS is an Outsell, Inc. company

When compiling yesterday's list of essential books I came across this book review archive from Time magazine. It is completely riveting and a wonderful example of how the Internet can enrich the history and understanding of literature and books. If you have a spare thirty minutes just dip in randomly at your favourite or least favourite books.

A commenter on yesterday's entry about lists observed quite rightly:

'This question always frightens me. I have a lurking fear that someone will hold me to it and strand me on the proverbial desert island with only the ten I unreflectively cited.'

This reminded me of an occasion when a very distinguished colleague was invited to appear on Desert Island Discs. As it happened, he was not in the least bit musical or knowledgeable about music and hadn't the faintest idea which eight pieces of music to choose. Clearly, however, it was vital that the list would impress listeners, particularly those of high intellect with whom he would normally mingle, with his erudition and good musical taste. He therefore asked his loyal team of workers to make suggestions. They did so and the list included the likes of Mozart, Beethoven, Mahler etc which sounded impressive and which he happily adopted as his own. What he didn't know was that every piece had been chosen because it was flawed in some way - the performer was hopeless, or the piece hackneyed, or it was musicologically unsound - such that his lack of musical nous was clear to the very people he was out to impress. A cruel, hopelessly disloyal but effective trick. The redeeming feature was that I'm not sure he ever realised.

Walking to work this morning (cold but clear) past the British Library, whose architecture was knocked by a commenter last week, I had to stop and admire the development of St Pancras station next door. It's very definitely not contemporary architecture but it is a wonder nonetheless.

I've had a bad blog morning. I wrote a pile and then the server lost it. Grrr. So I'm running late today.

Anyway, World Book Day on March 1 approaches and it's their tenth anniversary. For some reason this always leads to a plethora of lists and this year the Bookseller (check out their excellent new web design) has asked a random bunch of readers like me to list their 'top ten books people cannot live without.' Of course any such list is pointless and subjective but I list mine for what it's worth. Incidentally I notice that this week's Bookseller poll shows that 59% of voters think that discounts will rise faster than book prices (29%) and book sales (10%) - we're an optimistic bunch.

1. Wisden Cricketers' Almanack - although you might do best to wait until the 2007 edition is published, along with Spring, towards the end of March.

2. Oxford English Dictionary - I treasure my 20-volume set but really the online version is more sensible, less expensive, and does a better job.

3. Summer Lightning by P.G.Wodehouse, the master who created an England which probably never existed but should have.

4. Billy Bunter's Brainwave by Frank Richards whose real name was Charles Hamilton and who was not only the least politically correct novelist (and one of the funniest) but also the most prolific - 80 million words in a lifetime is going some. Here is Bunter as played by Gerald Campion.

5. The darling Buds of May by H.E.Bates - for humane comfort.

6. A Handful of Dust - by the dreadful but brilliant Evelyn Waugh and well worth reading this review from 1934.

7. A Fine Balance by the magical Parsee writer, Rohinton Mistry.

8. A-Z of London - although I fear that more and more it's being replaced by UK Streetmap.

9. Times Atlas of the World for obvious reasons.

And finally

10. A Kid for Two Farthings by Wolf Mankowitz - because we all need some schmaltz in our life.

Do let me know your lists.

There is a traditional niche in publishing for books about spooks, codes, conspiracies, and leaks. I have never been an addict although I was peripherally involved in the publication of Peter Wright's memoir and expose of MI5, Spycatcher. The book was commissioned by Heinemann in London with modest expectations of sales. I think the first printing was to be in the low thousands of copies. The British Government tried to ban it. Lots of lawyers made lots of money. Paul Hamlyn was courageous and unwilling to be bullied or bribed by the great and the good of the time. Publication was moved to Australia. The book was printed in Ireland and Finland and could therefore be legally imported into the UK whatever the Government tried to do. It went on to sell (literally and truthfully) millions.

On a more serious level there have been many books about the British Government's intelligence centre, GCHQ, in Cheltenham. I hope I won't be arrested for showing this picture of its latest office building.

I was reminded about spy publishing by the arrival yesterday of a copy of Thirty Secret Years by my former boss and friend, Robin Denniston. The book is about his father, Alastair Denniston, who was in charge of the code-breaking team at Bletchley Park during the war. There are many historians who reckon that this project was a defining contribution to the outcome of the war.

I don't suppose the book will be another Spycatcher in terms of sales, not least because the Government has probably learned a few lessons about censorship attempts, but it would be great to see Robin and his far-sighted publishers, Polperro Heritage Press, succeed. It is a fascinating account of the back-room teams of intelligence and a social history of a special period of world history. The book is underpriced in trade paperback (in my opinion) and so order now!

Alastair Denniston worked in secret on behalf of Britain for thirty years. Neither the Times nor the Guardian published an obituary of him although belatedly the Dictionary of National Biography has put the record straight. On a much less important stage he reminds me of all those people in publishing who ensure success but never get any recognition. So a salute to the code-breakers of publishing as well as to Alastair Denniston.

Neologism of the day - 'frenemies', to describe the likes of Google or Amazon. They are our best friends but could easily become our worst enemies.

On the right of this picture is the British novelist, Peter James, receiving the Prix Coeur Noir, France's leading award for crime fiction. Or as the PR agency Midas headlines its release: French beaten on home turf for major literary prize by plucky Brit. You can read him in English and German too.

I mentioned the party we held on Australia Day to celebrate the careers of Geoff Todd and Mike Barnard, two long-serving Macmillan directors. I'm not sure they'll thank me for this but here are photos of them at the party. Geoff is the Burns lookalike, Mike with the guitar.

Finally, to round out the Macmillan top sellers for 2006, here is the list of our top twenty English language teaching  courses in unit sales order. For obvious commercial reasons I'm not publishing the actual numbers but I have been allowed to say that the first course in the list had sales of 50,513,200 in the year. The others were slightly less, but some pretty impressive numbers nonetheless. It's hard to link each of these individually but you can see a good selection at Macmillan English.

My piece yesterday on BookStore prompted my good friend, colleague and author Jeff Gomez to remind me of the blog he's set up to support his forthcoming book, Print is Dead, which we are publishing in print and electronically later this year. Jeff is responsible for the electronic publishing and marketing of much of Holtzbrinck Publishers, our sister company in USA and he knows what he's talking about.

And another sister company has just launched a new service to showcase the fruits of Chinese science to the world. It is Nature China. This has been made possible by the generous sponsorship support of AstraZeneca and is another example of the development of multiple business models to support the dissemination of scholarly material.

Yesterday I was asked in the comments for more detail on our visitors. Here are two pretty pictures showing which websites feed this blog and which countries during January. I hope they are helpful.