I was doing a little research in the fascinating Macmillan News Archive and came across the 10 February 1987 issue which is all about HM's death - his funeral in Westminster Abbey, reminiscences and obituaries from around the Macmillan world. It's worth a look. As is this is interview with Peter Cook who is almost better than the real thing. A wonderful Cook as Macmillan quote from a description of a summit meeting with JFK:

"We talked of many things, including Great Britain's position in the world as some kind of honest broker. I agreed with him when he said no nation could be more honest, and he agreed with me when I chaffed him and said no nation could be broker."

Back to the present and an irresistible parable about advertising today from a superb blog - Logic+Emotion - about marketing and design which was brought to my attention by Ann Michael.

I cannot resist posting this entry on the Future of Publishing from The Millions - a blog about books because it is entirely sensible in its review of Macmillan New Writing and because it helpfully lists all the titles available in the USA even though no American publisher was interested in the series.

I'm not sure how many readers of this blog understand German (beyond the title above) but I think this pdf courtesy of Der Spiegel is saying some pretty nice things about Nature, its commitment to innovation and the quality of the team.

Later comment by editor:It turns out that this pdf link will not work outside the Nature firewall and Spiegel Online understandably charges for articles, so here is a taster within 'fair usage':

'Timo Twin irrt leicht orientierungslos über den Strand, dann zickzack den Hang hinauf. „Na endlich, ich wusste doch, dass es hier irgendwo ist“, sagt der Mann im roten T-Shirt. Über einem weitläufigen Platz prangt groß wie ein Bauschild das Logo seines Unternehmens, weiß auf rotem Grund: „Nature“. Timo Twin ist in seinem neuen Reich angekommen, auf einer Insel im Online- Rollenspiel „Second Life“. Der Name der Insel ist Programm: „Second Nature“. Der Avatar sieht dem Timo im realen Leben nur entfernt ähnlich – dieser ist ein großer Mann Ende dreißig mit leicht rundlichem Harry-Potter-Gesicht. Er heißt Timo Hannay. Und er ist so etwas wie der Vertreter der Wissenschaftszeitschrift „Nature“ in der virtuellen Welt.'

The British Department of Trade and Industry has just released figures for 2006 exports of books and a comparison with previous years. It makes fascinating reading on the soon-to-be-revamped Publishers Association website. In spite of all the changes in the global economy and the growth of the English language the traditional English-speaking and Commonwealth markets still dominate. And for all the hooha over China we sell ten times as much to the Republic of Ireland with a population of 4 million as to China with a population of 1.3 billion.

Clearly, however, markets such as China and India will grow and I was delighted to read in the Economic Times of India that territorial protection of copyright has been upheld by a Delhi High Court injunction preventing re-export of low-priced Indian textbooks. Whilst this restricts Indian export sales it allows publishers to produce low-cost editions for the very poor without fear of those editions entering the more affluent American market. In time, of course, global prices will equalise but in the meantime territorial copyright protection is vital for the development of publishing and education in emerging economies. Supporting these developments is the International Publishers Association whose new website has just been launched and where it is good to see that annual Freedom Prize has been awarded to a Zimbabwean publisher.

This is the first Waterstone's bookshop at 99-101 Old Brompton Road in South Kensington, London. It was founded by Tim Waterstone in 1982 with the redundancy money he received when he was sacked by W.H.Smith. The chain has developed extraordinarily to become Britain's largest bookseller and Tim tells some of the story in his book Swimming against the Stream.

Yesterday evening Waterstone's and its current owners HMV threw a fabulous party to celebrate 25 years of bookselling and to honour our top authors of the last quarter century and the twenty five for the next quarter century. I was delighted that Macmillan scored a 12% 'market share' of the future with Emily Gravett, Charlotte Mendelson and C.J.Sansom being selected. For more on the list follow this link.

Who knows what the next twenty-five years of retail bookselling will bring (as evidenced by the debate on this blog) but Bill Gates seems to think he knows:

 "Reading is going to go completely online. We believe that as we get the smaller form factor, the screen has gotten good enough. Why is reading online better? It's up to date, you can navigate, you can follow links. The ads in the online reading are completely targeted as opposed to just being run-of-print, where many of the readers will find them completely irrelevant. The ads can be in new and richer formats. In fact the only drawbacks of the digital form are the things associated with the device: how big is it, heavy is it, how many hours of power does it have, how much do I have to spend to buy it? But those are things that once you achieve that threshold, in terms of the convenience and the cost, then you see a dramatic change in behavior. Today, for people who read newspapers and magazines, even the most avid PC user probably still does quite a bit of reading on print. As the device moves down in size and simplicity, that will change, and so somewhere in the next five-year period we'll hit that transition point, and things will be even more dramatic than they are today."

So now we know.

Today sees the beginning of Summer in England. It is grey, rather damp and not very warm but it is also the first day of the first cricket Test Match of the season and England take on West Indies at Lord's Cricket Ground.

The other event to take place today will be the announcement of Gordon Brown as Britain's next Prime Minister. I am no political expert but it does seem surprising that someone can take over the leadership of a country (the mother of parliamentary democracy I believe) without a ballot of the people, the parliament or even his own political party. I have nothing against Brown but I hope his self-appointment doesn't encourage any other country to impose democracy on us by invading what is a country with a huge armoury of weapons of mass destruction, a danger of splitting (Scottish Nationalists now govern in Edinburgh), a strong breeding ground for militant Islam, strategically placed geographically and with extraordinarily valuable assets - and an unelected leadership.

I've been trying (without success) to arrange to join a bunch of friends from Wisden in a walk across Southern England starting on Saturday in support of the Teenage Cancer Trust. The Trust was set up in memory of Laurie Engel, the son of Wisden editor, Matthew Engel. Royalties from Matthew's latest book, Extracts from the Red Notebooks also go the fund. I'm sure the team would welcome any companions on the walk which is described here and where you can also contribute.

A propos last week's posting about the Kim Scott Walwyn prize won by Annette Thomas here is a link to an article in the Guardian by Hermione Lee about it.

Over at Pan Macmillan, there are celebrations for the success of James Herbert's latest paperback The Secret of Crickley Hall. In hardback the book reached number one in the best seller list and it is sitting at number two in paperback, a smidgeon behind the number one (whose title I won't mention). There was a time when Pan only had to compete with Penguin for paperback sales and those days are beautifully chronicled on this website. Things are much tougher today but it is great to see that Pan's tradition of mass-market fiction brilliantly packaged and marketed continues. A couple of covers to compare now and then. The 1961 price was 2/6d (old money). The 2007 price is £6.99 although many outlets will be selling the book at a lower price. Inflation doesn't explain the whole of the increase.

I'm often slightly disappointed that this blog receives most comments on subjects affecting British independent booksellers. Of course there are important issues and I´m always pleased to hear from booksellers but there are other controversial matters for the book world. I was therefore pleased to see that Sara Lloyd's excellent guest piece on the future of reading has generated some thought-provoking and insightful comments from a range of people. Do join the debate if you can.

The last couple of weeks have seen the building blocks for a new educational publishing landscape. The Pearson acquisition of what I know as Heinemann Education in the UK and Commonwealth and Harcourt Assessment in the USA (for $950 million); the sale of Thomson Learning (for $7.7 billion) to a private equity consortium (presumably with the intention of buying out the remaining bits of Harcourt Education); and the continuing speculation about the fate of Wolters-Kluwer's education divisions; all point to radical change in response to perceived technology shifts in teaching. The bets being placed are enormous but the rewards (and risks) are high.

If e-learning really establishes itself in schools (as I am sure it will) there will be an inevitable knock-on impact on the way adults will read and acquire information and hence the importance of the debate about the future of reading. It may take longer for some of the predictions about e-books etc to come true but the book trade simply has to come to terms with these new media before it's too late and we lose a generation of readers. Hence Macmillan's commitment to BookStore.

I leave you with a photo of where I am today.

A few days ago I mentioned a visit I made to a school in Soweto. Here is a picture of Boepakitso Primary School.

A fairly typical and functional piece of architecture and scene by any standards. What it doesn't show is the commitment, verve and vision of the teaching staff and the enthusiasm of the children. The school is partly supported by the Read Educational Trust which is our partner in South African publishing sector's first black empowerment transaction.

For those interested in statistics, our promotional video for Quirkology which I wrote about last week has now been viewed 769,427 times. Now, if each view sells a book...

After my technology-jinxed weekend in Suffolk I'm glad to be independent of guest bloggers but concerned that the guests succeeded kicking traffic numbers up and I suspect fooled readers into expecting higher standards of writing and insight than I can manage.

While on the standard of writing, here is an Observer review of my pick of the moment. Do get hold of a copy of When we were bad and find a few hours to read it. See if you agree with the reviewer and me.

As I'm still stuck in the technological black hole that is deepest darkest Suffolk, I've asked our Digital Publisher Sara Lloyd to expand on the email she pinged off to me last week after reading her Friday copy of Guardian supplement g2...

To adulterate a joke made by that funny doctor bloke Dr Phil Hammond on Have I Got News for You last night, "a qualification as 'Head of Digital Publishing' for a major international publisher is really no substitute for clairvoyancy". I'd like to start from this point to avoid jokes made at my expense later; predicting the future has always been wrought with hazards and I lay no specialist claims to being able to do so.

However, I did get just a teensy weensy bit excited to read Andrew Marr's feature, 'Curling up with a good eBook'  in g2 on Friday. This much loved and respected journalist, broadcaster and writer was given one of the latest eReaders, an Irex Iliad, to road test for a month. It was a case of 'bibliophile, or perhaps bibliomaniac, meets book-killer', as he so Andrew-Marr-ishly put it. You can read the article for yourself, but the results were surprising, in some ways. This key proponent of the book as beautiful object / thing to be read in the bath argument and sniffer of dusty covers in second hand bookshops was 'reluctantly impressed' with his ebook. He could even see a future in which he'd choose the e-version of 'a dozen new novels or biographies' to replace his bulging book bag when travelling, and he could certainly see the advantage of this when combined with an ability to download all the newspapers, magazines and other 'throwaway' content that he needs to digest on a regular basis.

For me the existing ereaders on the market still don't cut it. The 'killer device' - an iPod for books - isn't with us yet, but I think this generation of ereaders could be the beginning of a quiet revolution. As major Internet and computing players enter the fray to carve out a piece of the ebook market which they all believe could be round the corner and the 'download generation' graduate into the consumers of tomorrow, the ground has got to shift. Hasn't it?

It transpires that technology is less developed in Suffolk than in Patagonia.  As a result I've asked 'Woman Publisher of the Year' NPG's Managing Director Annette Thomas to write a few words...

Site licenses have revolutionised the way that researchers access content and numerous studies have shown that there is now more access to more content and at lower prices than ever before.  But this all a bit heavy for a Saturday morning, so on to the point of this posting.

Every summer Nature Publishing Group's site license business unit holds their annual sales conference.  For the past 3 years we've gathered together at the Ocean Resort and Spa on the New Jersey Coast.

Like most sales conferences the days are filled with a mix of work and play and everyone has a good time. The meeting is organised by the excellent Geoff Worton who heads up our world-class sales team.

This year we've changed venues and we'll be meeting at the Hudson Hotel in NYC. It looks very posh (and expensive) but I've been assured that we've negotiated a very good rate.

Yesterday I received the agenda of the meeting and to my shock/horror/surprise/delight I no longer have top billing on the program.  Apparently Richard will be attending and I've been relegated to introducing him.  What to say? What to say?  I'm appealing to readers of this blog to send me their suggestions.

Have a lovely weekend

Annette