India duly won the latest cricket test match against England and thus cannot lose the three-match series and have a very good chance of winning it by drawing or winning the last game. They bowled and batted very well and deserved the victory. This is the India captain, Rahul Dravid, celebrating.

The England management will have various explanations and will point to various turning points over the five days of the game. However, I think the series was forfeited by England on the mid-afternoon of the fourth day of the previous game. England had built a lead of more than 350 with their star batsman, Kevin Pietersen, with a century to his name. Instead of launching an all-out attack on India they batted sedately and unproductively for an extra hour to add a few more runs and reduce the chance of India winning. As a result they had no opportunity to bowl at India before the tea break. The forecast for the following day suggested rain. The England lead was almost impregnable. There was only one reason to bat on - the fear of losing. In the end, the rain did arrive on Monday just in time to save India. Had England not been afraid of losing they would definitely have won the game - and demoralised India and almost certainly won the series. A great example of knowing when to be brave and seize the moment. It's sad that England failed but great for India and for cricket - and I hope (but doubt) that the lesson will be learnt.

Incidentally, the same applies to publishing. Carpe diem.

It's the first of the month. In July this blog had 84682 visits, a come-down from the amazing June statistics caused by the Google heist post. However, total visits to date have reached 991,226, within spitting distance of a golden blog award.

I've had to say no to a unique launch party for a celebrity biography on Thursday (out of the country). It's unique because the average age of the invitees is somewhere in the eighties and the main tipple will be tea. And it's unique because this celebrity biography is about a not very famous person who deserves to be more famous as opposed to the normal book about a famous person who has little to say and not much talent.

The biographee is Alice Herz Sommer (do listen to this Woman's Hour interview) and the book is A Garden of Eden in Hell.

Alice was born in 1903 (work it out) and is still going strong. She suffered in a Nazi concentration camp but continued to play piano throughout the ordeal. She is still playing today and you can purchase a CD of her music from reinhard.piechocki@t.online.de .

I doubt that sales of this book will exceed those of Wayne Rooney, Jordan et al but somehow I feel it's a little more deserving.

Yesterday saw the annual Science v Nature cricket match which Nature duly won. If only the England cricket team were as reliable. Incidentally, Nature took the first three wickets with the first three balls of the Science innings. Is that one for next year's Wisden?

When I worked at Reed Elsevier we had a policy of not selling any spare capacity in our distribution business to third parties. The logic was that we shouldn't help potential competitors to grow in any way. At Macmillan, we take the completely opposite view. We are happy to see competitors grow while using our services and helping us to become more effcient too. As a result we offer all sorts of services to our competitors - typesetting and text processing, copyediting, website development, Asian print sourcing, advertisement design, sales and distribution in USA, UK, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Ireland, India etc. It's a big set of businesses employing more than 4000 people worldwide and the scale we achieve from serving others as well as ourselves allows us to compete effectively with much larger publishing operations.

This is a preamble to a mini-review of one of our UK sales and distribution clients, the start-up company The Friday Project. It's been a fascinating ride for them and for us. The Pan Macmillan sales team represents their books to the trade and Macmillan Distribution services their orders.

Their strapline 'Turning the best of the web into the finest of books' is fine but it doesn't lead to commissioning focus. The catalogue is all over the place which is both its charm and its problem. The business has had its ups and downs. Good sales months followed by less good ones. Good books selling really well such as Blood, Sweat and Tea. Other good books not finding their market. But the key directors, Clare Christian and Scott Pack, have soldiered on and TFP is now a thriving publishing company with a stable workforce, a pipeline of new books, a backlist and one of the best websites (and blog sites) in the industry. I just hope that we can continue to work with them until they're big enough to kick us in the teeth and do their own thing.

Back-office support for independent publishers is not as glamorous as publishing itself but it can rewarding and companies like TFP can grow to be the likes of Quadrille or Bloomsbury. Fingers crossed for all small publishers.

Ask a typical manufacturer what his returns percentage is and he'll probably tell you his profit return on sales. Ask a publisher and he'll seethe about the perecentage of books sent back to his warehouse by retailers.

I'm not sure which publisher uttered these famous words when conducting a visitor round his warehouse and seeing a parcel of books ready for despatch:

'Gone today, here tomorrow.'

Perhaps someone can enlighten me as the who and the when. I'm not sure the official histories of publishing identify the first person to say to a bookseller:'I know you don't think you can sell a dozen but take them anyway and, if you're right, I'll take back the unsolds and give you full credit.' Whoever it was unleashed a trade practice which not only decimates publishers' and booksellers' margins but it eats up retail space, diminishes the need for buying and selling skills, and doesn't do the environment much good either.

In Australia a few years ago, several publishers introduced backlist firm sale. This seems to be working fine and there is now a movement in the UK to do the same which I applaud. I also applaud Bloomsbury's returns limit on Harry Potter.

But what saddens me is that we seem to make no progress on the total elimination of returns. One of the arguments for the abandonment of retail price maintenance was that it would allow retailers to remainder without the absurdity of sending books back to the publisher, the publisher shipping them to a remainder merchant and the bookseller then buying the books back at remainder price for sale on the 'cheap' table. I ran an experiment with Waterstone's in the early 1990s where they were granted an extra couple of points of discount in exchange for no returns (except damaged books). It worked pretty well except that change of management and ownership meant it was discontinued. Why not try it again? We have nothing to lose except tons of credit notes, complexity, carbon dioxide and lazy buyers.

It's Saturday. The sun's out here in France. England are being humiliated by India at Trent Bridge and I believe the state of terrorist alert has fallen from red to amber. Incidentally, here is the official terrorist position.

The English are feeling the pinch in relation to recent terrorist
threats and have raised their security level from "Miffed" to "Peeved".
Soon, though, security levels may be raised yet again to "Irritated" or
even "A Bit Cross". Londoners have not been "A Bit Cross" since the
blitz began in 1940 and tea supplies all but ran out. Terrorists have
been re-categorized from "Tiresome" to "A Bloody Nuisance". The last
time the British issued "A Bloody Nuisance" warning level was during
the great fire of 1666.

I stop there because the rest of the joke was too anti French, German and Spanish for me to risk losing friends.

Back to cricket and Jonny Borrell. Here is the link to the teatime interview with him. I have pinched the BBC headline as the title of today's blog as an example of a contradiction in terms.

Of course, we all know that Australia rules the cricket world but I was delighted to hear that Macmillan Education Australia won both Primary Publisher of the Year and Secondary Publisher of the Year at the annual Awards for Excellence in Educational Publishing in Melbourne last week.

My old friend Adam Hodgkin posed a question in a comment here which I think is worth a discussion.

I would be interested in the Macmillan view on why it has been possible to develop really excellent and profitable digital publishing for the Nature audience, and the commercial digital market still doesn't look at all convincing for trade publishing in general.

The first thing to say is that Macmillan doesn't have a view. Macmillan is made up of several thousand people all of whom have different views on more or less everything, thank goodness. This is my view.

1. Scientists are by their nature early adopters of technology and thus have had no problems moving from communicating in print to communicating digitally.

2. Scientific publishing has been intrinsically more profitable than trade book publishing. This allowed the major publishers and societies to invest the significant sums needed to create electronic delivery and storage platforms for scientific information. These platforms are a cornerstone for the creation of a new business and communication model.

3. Budgets for the acquisition of scientific information already existed and coud be readily transferred from print to digital acquisitions. These budgets were and are controlled by a professional cadre of librarians whose job is to ensure the best and most economic retrieval of information. They are the key partners to ensure highest standards.

4. The people who work in scientific publishing are by and large fascinated by the challenges of delivering often obscure information to a global audience and have embraced digital technology.

Trade book publishing has very different characteristics.

1. The general public has adopted some new technologies very quickly but to most people a book is a book - sheets of paper between covers, usable without batteries and readily portable.

2. Trade book publishing is usually a low-margin business and any spare cash has tended to be spent on investing in new authors and new marketing campaigns rather than long-term technological platforms. This is changing now with the emergence of solutions such as BookStore but this late movement hasn't helped a business model to develop.

3. Apart from the less-than-healthy public library market, there are no institutional budgets for the purchase of trade books and so no easy way of pump-priming the market.

4. The people who work in trade publishig are driven by the desire to find a great new author, to mix in the world of literature, to win literary prizes. Delivery mechanisms and complex technology are simply not high on their agendas. This is also changing but it will take time. 

And I suppose the final reason why trade books will find it harder to establish a digital model than scientific journals is that not all books are purchased simply to be read. They are purchased as gifts, as furniture, as status symbol, as insurance against boredom. None of these reasons is adequately solved by a digital version. A scientific paper is only purchased for its content.

However, none of this means we should not be investing in digital delivery of trade books. We owe it to our authors to invest in every means of finding an audience for their works. We owe it to them to hold their copyright material securely and to fight on their behalf to protect their rights. We need to serve readers in whatever way they choose. We need to work with public libraries to make digital and on-demand editions of books available through them. We need to use digital versions to promote books and to create digital libraries for research and study.

Trade books are different now but I'm convinced that the technological gap between general book publishing and scientific publishing will narrow - and the pace is gathering.

To finish today's blog on the future of books I thought I'd share a thought sent to me by an old colleague of mine in France. Apparently the most interesting analysis of publishers' and authors' rights issues and their interaction with the concepts of digital libraries, open access and public domain is to be found in the 1763 La lettre sur le commerce des livres by the always brilliant Denis Diderot. Apparently it has never been translated into English and it should be. Can anyone help?

I can't resist this quote (of no relevance whatsoever to books or publishing) from the man himself:

Il y a un peu de testicule au fond de nos sentiments les plus sublimes et de notre tendresse la plus épurée.

This blog is usually about one or other aspect of publishing and books. Today is different. I celebrated the release of the six foreign health workers from Libya and the threat of the death penalty a couple of days ago. Our editorial team, and in particular our senior reporter Declan Butler, at Nature played an active part in the campaign to secure their release and Declan has written this piece as a guest blog explaining more of the background. As I said before, I am really proud of Nature's part in achieving a modicum of justice and grateful for Declan's contribution.

How much more ransom was really paid in the murky deal between the European Union and Libya will probably never be known. The $400 million in 'blood money' paid to the families of the infected children from an opaque international fund – which paved the way for the end of the crisis -- may in fact have largely been paid by Libya, as part of a complex face saving deal. But Libya extorted concessions on debt relief, and many other fronts. The EU has also promised returns by normalizing its political and economic ties with Libya.

The human rights case was also not entirely lost. After the verdict, the EU broke temporarily with its policy of 'silent diplomacy' -- refraining from public criticism of Libya's handling of the case and relying on behind-the-scenes discussions – and condemned in no uncertain terms the human rights violations, and abuse of scientific evidence in the case. This, combined with the fact that Bulgaria became a member of the European Union at the start of the year, led to pressure for a speedy resolution of the case.

The 1998 outbreak was a triple tragedy — for the six unjustly imprisoned, and for the infected children and families. Exoneration of the medics must be the next step. And as Vittorio Colizzi, an AIDS researcher at Tor Vergata University in Rome, Italy, who campaigned for scientific evidence exonerating the medical workers to be considered by the Libyan courts, says: "We must not forget the children." The third victim was the stuggle to have nation states abide by the fundamental international principles of justice and human rights enshrined in treaties to which they are, on paper, parties to.

The Charleston Report, a newsletter about the US Library Market, has been landing on my desk - and over the last ten years - my desktop, for more years than I care to remember. Its focus is of course now primarily on changes brought about within the market by the impact of digital, and it always highlights some interesting tidbits. If the latest edition is anything to go by, it seems social networking trends have hit libraries jus as much as other markets, with reports that:

1.  50% of faculty members across the US believe social networking sites will change the way students learn according to a recent Thomson survey
2. video advertising through sites such as YouTube is now a significant trend as shown by a  survey by the Online Publishers Association (OPA) which reveals substantial statistical data on the attitudes and behaviours of Internet users towards online video
3. OCLC has added a social networking feature to WorldCat.org, to allow users to create their own profile and create personalised lists of items catalogued in WorldCat, then share them with colleagues
4. the 'Infotubey' award winners have recently been announced - 'Infotubeys' being awards given to libraries for exemplary content posted on YouTube. Information on winners can be viewed here.

And the social networking theme continues as I have just learned that Pan Macmillan has developed a facebook page for its forthcoming title HEARTSICK, with the aim of generating publicity for the book in advance of publication on 3 August. The group has 150 members and counting, perhaps lured by the promise of a free advance book proof (while stocks last) to everyone who joins the group. Facebook fans might also like to look up the facebook group dedicated to our new book lovers' community site, lovelybooks,  here. 

On an entirely separate theme our Australian publishing deserves another mention today as Les Carlyon's brilliant book The Great War, published by Pan Macmillan Australia, won Australian Book of the Year last night at the 2007 Australian Book Industry Awards (ABIA), as reported by the Australian News here.