An old friend and colleague came to visit me yesterday to discuss her new publishing project, Pocket Issue books. This a series of well-written, beautifully produced (with illustrations by my favourite cartoonist Andrzej Krauze), well-priced at £4.99 books on well-chosen subjects of contemporary interest.

The problem is that support from the book trade is unlikely to exceed a few hundred copies, the cost and energy for marketing is very high, and thus expenditure will almost certainly exceed income unless she can find alternative ways of generating significant sales. Any ideas would be welcome - and even a few orders for the books.

The Google heist posting of last week is still generating considerable comment here and elsewhere. I am being characterised variously as a fool, a child, a luddite, a crook, or a counter-revolutionary. Hey ho. At least it has generated debate, not least as to whether physical property has greater rights to protection than intellectual property. I don't know but somehow this photo from Book Expo America courtesy of Publishers Marketplace says something about the relative sizes of Google and a very large publisher.

And while on Google matters, I was checking out the excellent Google Scholar platform, which is an example of how search engines and publishers can work together within copyright to allow readers to find what they want, scholars to communicate better, and still have a viable business model.

But that's not my point. I noticed the tag line, 'Stand on the shoulders of giants'. This comes from a letter by Isaac Newton to his contemporary Robert Hooke:

'If I have seen further it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants.'

The quotation is frequently used as an example of scientific humility. It transpires that Hooke was one of Newton's greatest rivals and enemies and was rather small and deformed. Read the quotation with the emphasis on the word 'giants' and you will see that Newton and his quotation were not in the least bit humble. Truth is a strange thing. For more on Newton try this paper by Nobel-prize-winning physicist Sheldon Glashow.

I was in Chennai on Monday for the Annual General Meeting of Macmillan India Limited. We presented the 2006 results and gave some guidance about 2007. You can see a number of presentations here . In short, sales were up more than 40% while profits were flat as a result of increased long-term investment and the need to offer extremely competitive prices to customers. Of course there are some shareholders who would rather we reduced investment and increased dividends and the picture below shows the board with a dissenting shareholder seated in front of us. It's a shame the picture doesn't show the other hundred shareholders who supported the board and its investment policy on their behalf.

Here is a sad tale of the times in which we live.

As I come to the end of another week of travelling, I was amused by the latest addition to Dan O’Connor’s Department of Neologisms, the noun ‘Scrobbleizer’ , which is apparently a tool that automatically creates a list of your favourite well-paid corporate bloggers. God forbid that I should ever be scrobbleized.

In other news I was interested to read this by blogger Robert Nagle on the attractions, and disattractions, of the current crop of eReaders, focusing on the Sony device.

And finally, despite the initial sensation of shabbiness that attached itself to me after the Google heist at Bookexpo on Friday, I have been buoyed by the support of the blogging community, for example in the comments on this blog here, as well as here and here. Although I have to admit I haven’t Scrobbleized them yet.

PS. Just found this link on The Register with 24 comments to date, mostly, but not all, supportive. One guy wants me to be banned from the USA for the crime. It could be worse. 

While moseying around Book Expo in New York on Friday, I came across a wondrous sign on the OUP USA stand. I managed to persuade a passing Japanese with a camera to snap the sign and gave him my email address to send me the photo. It hasn't arrived, but fortunately the OUP website has the same phrase in its description of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary:

The world's most comprehensive, thorough, and up-to-date unabridged dictionary, the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary is an essential resource for every library.

I encouraged the sales guy on the stand to look up the word 'unabridged in the Shorter' and of course it means unshortened.... But it's still a great dictionary.

Here's a worrying statistic from one of our international sales people. A campus bookstore manager showed him a breakdown of the shop's sales in the first three months of 2007 (the peak college season in that country) and 45% of revenue came from selling mobile airtime to students (and at very low margins).

As I've just spent thirty hours travelling from New York to Chennai (lesson - avoid Emirates like the plague) I'm a little behind with the news but I think this Irish initiative to find new non-fiction writers deserves a mention. The biggest problem was for the editor having to sift through more than 2000 submissions and now there's talk of making it an annual event.

The other bit of news I've only just tripped over is the decision by Reed-Elsevier to sell off its defence exhibition business because of pressure from various pacifist organisations and individuals. I'd be very interested in people's views on this. The danger is a form of creeping censorship where it is very difficult to draw the line between moral and non-moral activities when the activity is entirely legal. I suppose (and hope) that Reed-Elsevier's decision was entirely pragmatic - by selling they can make more money than by not selling. At least that is consistent with their philosophy. Any other reason would be a big worry for shareholders.

This is a typical scene at Book Expo America. A lot of people milling around aimlessly. But check out the picture below.

There's no computer where a computer should be to the left of the gentleman's arm. You will also notice that there is no sign saying 'please do not steal the computers'. I confess that a colleague and I simply picked up two computers from the Google stand and waited in close proximity until someone noticed. This took more than an hour.

Our justification for this appalling piece of criminal behaviour? The owner of the computer had not specifically told us not to steal it. If s/he had, we would not have done so. When s/he asked for its return, we did so. It is exactly what Google expects publishers to expect and accept in respect to intellectual property.

'If you don't tell us we may not digitise something, we shall do so. But we do no evil. So if you tell us to desist we shall.'

I felt rather shabby playing this trick on Google. They should feel the same playing the same trick on authors and publishers.

On a more positive note (but not making me feel less shabby nor Google less guilty) Google threw a great party in their amazing New York offices, for which I am very grateful.

The first of the month brings statistics. This blog enjoyed 81296 visits in May, up from the disappointing 68227 in April and taking the total visits to 770480. We should pass the million before year end.

Last night I went to a 'desserts party' at the right-on Housing Works Bookstore in SoHo.

We were there to celebrate our US children's publishing and to meet a number of the world's best children's authors. I was particularly pleased to meet Jacqueline Wilson who is an enormous success in the UK but, for no good reason, has not yet cracked America. Roaring Brook Press is now publishing her and I'm betting that they'll do the trick although the US market can be a fickle beast.

By the way, Roaring Brook are the publishers of one of my favourite children's books Leemons are not red which sadly and inexplicably (I'm sure there is a good explanation but it will be convoluted!) is not published by Macmillan Children's Books outside USA.

Now I'm off to the BEA to be horrified at the cost of the event, perplexed by the volume of new books, amazed at the creativity, baffled by the economics and cheered by meeting old friends and enemies.

I wrote about Wormsley cricket ground last week and Andrew Hall has kindly sent me this great photo of the back of the pavillion complete with a proper English phone box. It makes me homesick although this view from my hotel window compensates quite a bit.

The video promoting Richard Wiseman's Quirkology passed a million views on youtube yesterday. An extraordinary piece of book marketing which is generating global sales.

Similarly, this article about George Lucas using Starwars fans to create mash-up versions of his films raises issues about how best we book publishers can encourage reader involvement in the editorial process. It really is a brave new world.

Meanwhile, in the old world I have to go off to my next batch of board meetings - for St. Martin's Press, Tor and Scientific American. Pip pip.

Pedalling away on the exercise bike in the hotel gym here in New York I found myself watching this on the TV. Somehow it captures my frequent sufferings at the hands of mobile technology.

New York is looking great in beautiful May weather and the Flatiron Building which houses most of our US-based colleagues is looking close to its best after much renovation.

The only problem is that city appears to be overrun by British publishers. For instance, I bumped into sixteen visitors in the Palgrave Macmillan offices from small Northern British independent publishers such as Carcanet Press here to learn more about the American market and to visit Book Expo America ('Where the world gathers to get a great READ on the industry' - yuk). It was an intelligent and lively bunch of committed publishers but I found myself wondering (in a disgusted of Tonbridge Wells sort of way) why the North-West Regional Development Agency was spending British taxpayers' money on subsidising these very competent publishing people to discover America. It's a strange old world.

The other large and visible contingent comes from Google who are, as ever, telling the publishing industry and the world at large how lucky we are to be helped by them. There is an excellent piece about the recently-launched Google Universal in the latest Outsell newsletter (terrible branding for what used to be the clearly-labelled Electronic Publishing News). Here are the last two paragraphs for a flavour and a warning to publishers.

And in this lies the opportunity for other search engines and publishers as well. Google´s apparent abandonment of a vertical approach appears to open a door for others who are working on honing down their results to address a narrower field of content – be it based on subject, content type, or locale. But complacency here is not advised. Google will be applying the full force of its engineering to hone algorithms to decipher this vertical intent all from one screen. The opportunity for others to gain new users is now, before these results are improved significantly enough to keep some narrower audiences from looking around.

Yet amid this short term opportunity is perhaps an even greater threat. What Google´s new universal search provides is ultimately a platform for aggregating disparate pieces of information and displaying them in a unified view tailored to an individual´s unique needs. In short, it plants the seeds for Google to become an agile publisher and one that is able to cross nearly every type of content and medium. And it gets worse. With this change, searchers are now being exposed to pay-per-click (PPC) advertisements alongside web results that include video and news. This is a significant development as previous concerns over Google´s approach to copyright were largely quieted because the company did not run display ads along those sites like News and YouTube which caused the most concern. That line was quietly crossed last week by monetizing all web content – regardless of copyright - and the debate will now rest entirely on the definition of fair use. If publishers do not act aggressively now, they may soon be faced with a very large direct competitor able to monetize content it does not pay to produce.