Yesterday, England suffered some pretty bad floods which caused the usual amount of chaos and disarray. Amazingly however, there was play in the India-England cricket match even though it looked at one point like this.

This is, of course, not the first flood to hit Britain and Nature reports this week on the flood which created the English Channel 200,000 years ago - and you can listen to the podcast version too.

In spite of the floods we managed to distribute HP7 successfully. The acid test is that Macmillan distribution has hardly been mentioned in any of the coverage. Phew - and thanks again to the team.

The last few days have seen a series of almighty rows about HP7 and I've mentioned the book a couple of times (and so have Clive Keble and others in the comments) here and here. I've had any number of journalists ring up and ask me to opine, all of which I declined on the grounds of ignorance of the detail of the row and also because Macmillan Distribution is Bloomsbury's client and has a hard enough job ensuring the security and efficient delivery of the millions of copies of HP7 without me muddying the waters. (And here I simply have to say a big thank you to all at MDL who have contributed to the toughest logistical exercise in book distribution history and who, in spite of the pressures, have managed to maintain their customary high levels of service for all the other things they do. You know who you are. Fingers crossed that nothing goes wrong today and that you can take a well-earned mini-rest and enjoy the sense of a job well done).

However, tonight is the night and I cannot resist expressing some views. Harry Potter is the most amazing literary phenomenon of all time. I don't have the numbers (nor does anyone I suspect) but I reckon that more people have bought (or will have bought) Harry Potter books than any other title. The Bible may have printed more (it's been going a sight longer) but the majority of copies are given away rather than purchased. I cannot think of anything else that comes close. Even Mao's Little Red Book must have been overtaken.

Its impact on our and other industries has been phenomenal. Of course, Bloomsbury as the original English-language publisher has benefitted but think of all the foreign-language publishers, all the sales agencies, all the rep commissions, the printers, papermakers, freight forwarders, mail delivery organisations, Hollywood, retailers large and small, journalist desperate for copy, literary agents who owe J.K. Rowling and the editorial team at Bloomsbury a huge debt of gratitude.

There will always be carpers and knockers but we should rejoice that a whole generation of children around the world have been introduced to books and reading. It is the job of the rest of us now to turn those children into long-term readers and book buyers.

On a much more local level, Sky News have decided to host a Potter party at the Pan Bookshop in Fulham Road, London. All our regular and not so regular customers are welcome and the shenanigans begins at 10 p.m. Enjoy.

I was sent this link by the managing director of John Wisden. You have to be a little patient but the denouement is worth the wait. I don't think that the scene is from our Basingstoke customer services department but...

The Richard and Judy book club isn't everybody's cup of tea. I was at a meeting where a distinguished publisher blamed it for the decline of almost everything in the book trade - a mite extreme I thought. Clearly it (and other similar ventures elsewhere in the world) tend to make a very limited number of titles best sellers and this might to some extent draw sales away from other equally worthy books. On the other hand the TV show itself has done more for the profile of books and reading than anything else I can remember (except perhaps the Harry Potter phenomenon).

It's not surprising I feel positive about R&J. Here are some quotes from yesterday's show about Kate Morton's The House at Riverton:

You can read more about this and other attacks on libraries on Tim's Good Library blog. I don't suppose it will ever happen but wouldn't it be great if R&J launched a campaign to save public libraries from the ravages of inefficient bureaucracy and political correctness.

A book which will definitely not make the R&J club is Thirty Secret Years by my former boss, Robin Denniston. I wrote about it back in May when it was first published. It is great to see that a serious book from a serious but small and independent publisher Polperro Heritage Press has been picked up and reviewed sensibly in the Spectator. All is not lost.

Our trade publishing around the globe is having a run of successes. Today on Channel 4 at 5.30 Kate Morton's The House at Riverton  published by Pan Macmillan, which is one of Richard and Judy's Summer Reads, will be reviewed on the Richard and Judy Show by celebrity reviewers Matt Baker (of Blue Peter fame) and Jo Whiley.  In Australia, Who Killed Channel 9?, the book I blogged  about a week or so ago, is at No 1 after its first full week of sales. And in other trade publishing news, I'm pleased to see that the war of words between ASDA and Bloomsbury over the forthcoming Harry Potter launch was closed yesterday with Bloomsbury receiving the apology they deserved from the Walmart-owned supermarket chain, as reported here by The Bookseller.

Meanwhile, I was amused by the BBC's feature  on the man whose Internet life begins to eat up his entire business and personal life, so much so that he now pays someone else to be him online. Could it be time for me to employ a full-time 'digital biographer'?

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.