On Sunday I wrote enthusiastically about the report of a new Chairman of HarperCollins UK. It turns out that the story was a mistake caused by Publishing News's assumption that HCUK could only mean HarperCollins. This email from David Worlock's daughter, Kate:

Even though it was lovely to see a picture of my esteemed father in your blog today (and I'm sure he appreciates the compliment too!), the news has in fact been misreported.  He's been made non-executive Chairman of HCUK, a producer of online event management software (http://www.hcuk.net/home.asp), rather than HarperCollins. However, since people seem so keen on the idea, perhaps we may soon have HarperCollins knocking on the door as well.

This is, as one of our marketing people pointed out, either a coke machine or a digital content delivery system. It has been developed by the Laverna Group and is described by them as:

The Felix kiosk is a multi-level marketing device running on ADSL networks and offering a range of functions including Everyone’s a Winner game, Mobile Top-up, Digital Purchase library and ATM. Certain kiosks may also include an Instant print Photography unit.

Perhaps independent booksellers should look at installing one by the cash register.

Independent booksellers should also be interested in the row between Bloomsbury and the supermarket chain, ASDA. This is what a forthright Bloomsbury have had to say:

In the echo chamber that we sometimes inhabit as publishers, one often repeated concern is that we employ far too many English Literature graduates. I refer you, then, to a piece in The Times today by the sports writer Simon Barnes, which neither encourages nor refutes this view particularly, but which is definitely very amusing and thought provoking on the subject of English Literature degrees and their purpose. The précis version, for those with too little time to read it, is that young people today are under far too much pressure to follow degrees which ‘transform them into an effective economic unit’, that this is not helped by educationists developing courses that ‘look like short cuts to a sexy job’ (e.g. sport, journalism, fashion) and that it’s a real shame that we can’t go back to the days when a good old English Literature degree gave students the time and the excuse to ‘suss out the meaning of life.’ Barnes suggests that modern education prepares people for wealth but that the old approach made you richer. Or, in other words, that reading is the route to a more developed world – and self – view. I hate to hark on a familiar theme, but there’s much here to compare with the problems intrinsic to high street bookselling today; the best-seller, trend-following culture making some people a lot wealthier, for sure, but almost certainly making us as a nation poorer from a cultural point of view.

The trade press is a strange thing. An editor moving from one publishing house to another warrants headlines. As does a publisher signing a contract with an author for a book which will be lucky to sell 5000 copies. Or a discount promotion in a bookshop chain. Here is a recent and fairly typical Publishing News home page. The fourteenth item is News in Brief and the eighth and last story in that section is:

DAVID Worlock has been named Non-Executive Chairman of HarperCollins UK, and Ian Bedwell is appointed International Business Development Director. Worlock is currently Chief Research Fellow at Outsell Inc and his career has included roles at Thomson Corp and Pearson. Bedwell has enjoyed a long career at VNU, which he left earlier this year.

I think it it possibly the most important news item in the whole issue.

It is not my job to be generous about competitors and I have been known to be a tad dismissive of some strange bits of self-promotion (for instance, here). However, this appointment of David Worlock by HarperCollins UK shows that at least one British trade publisher is beginning to understand the importance of the digital revolution and the need for fundamental change.

I first met David several centuries ago when he was setting up Eurolex, a pioneer legal database business, for Thomson. He was a digital native then and he still is. I also heard an excellent talk last week by another HarperCollins executive, Brian Murray, who is Group President of the company worldwide. My guess is that HC are putting into place the management building blocks to take decisive action when it comes to finding new markets for books in electronic form. Building platforms from which to sell (e.g. BookStore ) is an essential, quite tricky and quite costly first step but the real difficulty is re-engineering a workforce used to the old ways of doing things. That's where people like David and Brian come in.

And Macmillan has people like that too!

This is the Macmillan team at the LABCI conference in Sao Paulo which I mentioned yesterday.

You can read more about the day and see a video of the opening ceremony (uploaded on youtube acrobatically by Emma Shercliff (centre of the photo) on their blog. What it doesn't explain is why they are all wearing aprons. It might be in defiance of a project we intiated a couple of years ago known as apron strings. The idea was (and is) that businesses such as Macmillan Brazil should cut the apron strings from the UK and set off on their own adventures. We've made good progress but it seems that there must still be some resdiual affection for the mother ship.

In jolly old England last week the unions at the Royal Mail Group held a further one-day strike, thus confirming the sense of Amazon's decision to cease using them for the delivery of parcels. However, the clever people at Publishing News used this as an opportunity to launch their new and excellent digital version. It's an ill wind...

I've been asked by a friend to help with a glossary of Yiddish terms. Can anyone help with the spellings of these words, better (and funnier) definitions, and corrections to howlers. Thanks so much.

This is where I was yesterday.

It is the breathtaking Peninsula de Magdalena in Santander. I was there with a colleague to join the annual meeting of the Federacion de Gremios de Editores de Espana (the Spanish Publishers' Association equivalent) to discuss the threats and opportunities for publishers in the digital world. We concluded that, in spite of all the difficulties and the length of the road, it's time for book publishers to take a walk on the digital wild side, build digital infrastructures, shake up traditional workflows, develop new marketing techniques and join the 21stcentury.

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic in Sao Paulo, our Macmillan English team is attending the annual LABCI (English language teaching) conference. You can read all about it on the MEC blog and here is the tourism ministry in Sao Paulo but our royal tradition (last week the Prince of Asturia award)continued with a mention of Macmillan English Campus by Princess Anne in her conference-opening address.

And finally on this mini world tour to Tokyo where there has been huge press coverage for an article by Emperor Akihito which has been published in Nature. Yet more royalty. What is going on?

It's hard to keep up with it all.

I've been finding it terribly difficult obeying the embargo on one particular press release this week, but I'm finally allowed to tell you that Pan Macmillan is publishing Cristiano Ronaldo's first and only official book, MOMENTS. Pan will be publishing partner to Pedro Paradela de Abreu of Ideias & Rumos, who launched the book in Portugal last Saturday.

MOMENTS is one of those books that everyone in the business feels a bit of a thrill about publishing; even those with little interest in 'the beautiful game' can see that such a unique insight into the world of football’s biggest star has got to be a hit. Pan's non-fiction publisher Richard Milner tells me that in the book, Ronaldo shares thoughts on some of his best moments on and off the pitch. It's a sumptuous book too, with over 150 photographs to accompany the text.

I'm told by trusted sources that he's also thought to be extremely gorgeous, so here's a picture of him sharing a joke with the Portuguese coach, Luiz Felipe Scolari, at the Lisbon press launch.

Meanwhile, in other excitement, the Pan Bookshop  is planning a big ‘summer extravaganza’  on Friday 20th July. They sent me this report about their plans:

For those of you who for some reason haven't picked up on this yet, this is the day of the midnight Harry Potter launch. There will be more written about books and bookshops than any other day this year and the bookshop has sensibly thought to take advantage of the acres of print to promote other aspects of bookselling.

In the morning there will be various entertainments for the under fives; at tea time we have two top-notch authors for older children and in the evening the adults will take over. The centre piece of this part of the day will be a history event to celebrate what a great year it has been for history books. Also featuring will be  the ever wonderful and wise Isabel Losada plus advice on getting your novel published from the very experienced Michael Cady. A blues band will play until the shop closes at 10pm, only to reopen at midnight for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows to go on sale.

I'm pleased to say that the book will be sold at full cover price; independent booksellers like the Pan Bookshop may not be able to compete on price but they can certainly compete on the individuality and creativity of their promotions, and those in the queue for their copy of this much-awaited book will be entertained royally by the sounds of it. We hope to see you there.
 
 

This is going to be the shortest posting for a while but it might just be the most important. Click on this link to Jeff Gomez's excellent Print is Dead blog. Perhaps Manolis Kelaidis is to the digital world what Allen Lane was to mass-market paperbacks, Paul Hamlyn to colour illustrated books, or Robert Maxwell to scientific publishing.

About six months ago some colleagues in Germany launched a community site for book lovers Lovely Books. It is a great success and because imitation is the sincerest form of flattery (and because we asked prior permission) we have copied it. Yesterday saw the launch of the beta version of the English-language lovelybooks.com. The more people who sign up and use the site the better it will become. Do please give it a go and feed back too. Here's a shot of the German version.

I was castigated recently by a commenter, Alan Kellogg, for the pricing of a pdf in Nature.. I had actually linked to a free pdf - Nature makes some of its content available free of charge as well as the bulk being available on subscription or 'by the drink' - but he latched on to the price of associated articles:

'$30.00 for a file of an article? A file you don't need to print, bind, or mail? A file the customer can download. A file you don't need to replace because the customer is getting a copy?

You can find 300 page PDFs on the web for $10.00, and the publisher make a profit. How long is the typical Nature article?'

I think he is missing the point about value of information. It cannot be measured by price per page. It cannot be measured by the cost of paper or replaceability. It can only be measured by its usefulness to the reader and to some extent in relation to the cost of producing it. In the case of articles in Nature we have a rejection rate of well over 90%. This is an extremely costly process requiring teams of skilled scientists separating the wheat from the chaff and publishing only the very best and most pertinent articles. $30 is not a reflection of the length of the article, it is for the knowledge that the article in question is reliable and in part it reflects the cost of NOT publishing the rejected articles.

Finally, a very strange postscript to the blog linking the new Harry Potter film and Wisden Cricketers' Almanack from the Daily Telegraph:

" He [Daniel Radcliffe] has, he says, been plagued by strange dreams lately, although he cannot lay the blame at Harry Potter's door. "I've dreamt I'm being stalked by an England cricketer. I don't know what prompted it - although I've been watching huge amounts of cricket - but for some reason Andrew Strauss was being paid to stalk me. I woke up with a cricket bat in my hand.""